Catholic Jedi, Protestant Wizards

A recent visit to Orlando brought home to me how different the respective aesthetic visions of Star Wars and Harry Potter are. A thesis came to me: Jedi are Catholic and Wizards are Protestant.

By which I mean: The narrative, themes, and overall look and feel of George Lucas’s fantasy galaxy are Catholic in nature, while those of J. K. Rowling’s are Protestant. I tossed off the idea on my micro blog, but let me unfold it a bit more here.

Although Star Wars is superficially science fiction, it’s presented from the start as a fairy tale set in the distant past, featuring an orphan, a princess, and an evil empire. Everything centers around the decadence and fall of a long-regnant republic and the rise, in its place, of an empire led by a tyrant. In other words, we’re in Gibbon territory; we’re somewhere in the early medieval period. Moreover, the films are saturated with nostalgia for a lost time of peace and justice when a small religious order was allied to the republican senate. This order selected children from a young age for training and membership, required of them lifelong celibacy, and taught them an intimate relationship with an all-powerful numinous reality that binds all life together. They also gave them swords and called them knights. For a millennium they governed without serious rival, though we should assume they put down untold rebellions(!) in countless corners of the galaxy.

In a sense Lucas is merging the old Roman Republic with the Holy Roman Empire of the middle ages. A thousand years of throne and altar united in service to the common good, led by an elite of religious warriors and celibate servants who minister from a temple down the proverbial street from the senate. Jedi are Roman Catholic.

Whereas Rowling’s wizards and witches belong to the modern or even the postmodern world. Their identity and power are a secret. They, too, form a minority of elites among the wider population of muggles, but they do not rule arm in arm with parliament (even if the prime minister apparently knows about them). In brief, they choose to live anonymously in a disenchanted age, though their very existence is a living contradiction of it. Yet their invisibility cannot, by definition, rise to the level of being a sign of contradiction—except to us readers, who (like them) like disenchanted lives yet (unlike them) continue to disbelieve in magic.

It’s true that the aesthetics of Harry Potter is “high church,” but only in the way that empty cathedrals in Europe are “high church.” Oxford and Cambridge and the aura of boarding schools may feel enchanted, or perhaps enchanting, to American readers, but that says more about us than about them. Does anyone at Hogwarts pray the daily office? Is there a chapel for morning prayer? Does anyone across all seven books pray at all? (I don’t recall mention of eucharistic celebration, but I cede the question to the scholastics of fandom.)

The difference with Tolkien on this point is important: Middle-earth’s religion is everywhere and nowhere because it is another world than ours, and that was his goal—he didn’t want an ecclesiastical hierarchy as a simple mirror image of Europe. Yet Rowling’s world is ostensibly ours plus magic, while religion is nowhere to be seen. This isn’t belied by her personal faith, the theological themes of the story, or the occasional references to Scripture; these rather prove the point. She is telling a Protestant story. Her wizards are secular. No doubt some of them believe in God. But whereas magic is just there, a living and undoubted phenomenon for any student or teacher at Hogwarts, God and religion are options, presenting one among many choices, including unbelief.

Harry Potter thus lives in the wake of the Protestant revolution. He is an autonomous individual adrift in a chaotic, disenchanted, disestablished time. He must choose for himself. The robes and castles are vestiges of a world gone by, never to return. To the extent that they continue to function religiously, they bind together a literally enchanted sub-world—a magical enclave safe, for a time, from the secular world. But after seven years, he has to return to that world and live as though magic doesn’t exist. In a sense, he must live a false identity, and therefore inauthentically. (Paging existentialism.)

By contrast, the Jedi in their heyday and even in their triumphant return to glory are definitionally public figures: they live differently, they dress differently, they speak differently—they hold themselves aloof from the masses. They may occasionally produce failed recruits as well as ronin, but a Jedi in disguise is a Jedi ashamed of himself. He lives as a recluse, in exile, because of some great defeat; his proper nature is to brandish lightsaber and wield authority as if he were born for it. Which, according to the Jedi, he was.

Such, at any rate, is my half-baked theory about why Jedi are medieval Catholics and Wizards are secular Protestants. I’ll now open up the floor for questions.

The Acolyte: mea culpa & apologia

I take it all back.

In my view, the final two episodes of The Acolyte’s first season redeemed the whole thing. It didn’t become perfect, but it did become something: an actual story, told with perspective and, by the end, with style.

From what I can tell, this is not the consensus. And I don’t deny that flaws remain. But what felt missing that felt so frustrating through five episodes made itself apparent by episodes seven and eight. Let me start with the flaws before I defend the show and issue my mea culpa.

First, Amandla Stenberg is not, at least on this show, a particularly good actress. Her range is minimal; she played both twins almost indistinguishably; and her inability fully to sell her descent to the Dark Side is an understandable hurdle for viewers disappointed with the finale.

Second, the whole idea of twin sisters played by the same actress was goofy from word go and never paid off. Alas.

Third, it’s true that we were not in need of a replay of The Last Jedi’s basic beats: revisionist Jedi deconstruction mediated by Rashomon-like competing memories of an ambiguous tragic accident whose misunderstandings turn a hero into a villain.

Fourth, I still don’t understand why the twins had to be separated at the end, nor exactly why Mae’s memory of Osha has to be erased entirely—yet with the hope that they would one day be reunited. Huh?

Fifth and finally, I grasp the seven-year long frustration with Disney seemingly trying to undermine the Jedi at every turn in the Star Wars extended canon. Once the coolest, most mysterious characters around, they’re now lying bureaucrats who can’t be trusted, and who certainly are no match for the Sith.

Let me begin in reverse.

To begin, don’t blame Disney or Rian Johnson. Blame George Lucas. He’s the one who not only told of a thousand-year Jedi reign brought down by the Dark Side and the Empire—raising the question, “Why and how did they lose?”—but also offered his own answer in the prequel trilogy. That answer was: sectarian insularity, political sclerosis, spiritual blindness, and institutional decadence. If you don’t like Jedi as weak and foolish celibate wizard cops more eager to save their own hide than to protect the weak, then blame Lucas, not the last decade of Star Wars canon. It’s his fault.

Besides, he was right. He was always telling a fall-of-Rome descent from a republic to an empire, and if it was all happening beneath the noses of the Jedi, and if a rival rose quickly enough and powerful enough to wipe them out in a flash, then doubtless they were at fault to some extent. And The Phantom Menace clinched the deal: Qui-Gon Jinn is the fly in the ointment whose death at the hands of Darth Maul simultaneously ensures (a) the defeat of the Jedi, since they will no longer have a critical voice in their midst to possibly heed, and (b) the return of the Jedi, since his dying wish was for Anakin to be trained, and Anakin proved himself the Chosen One prophesied to bring balance to the Force by destroying Palpatine. (Reminder: Episode IX never happened.)

Granted all this, it was an inspired choice by Leslye Headland to make the final image of the series the iconic head of Yoda, framed from behind. If Yoda’s life is more or less coextensive with the rule of the Jedi, then he’s got to take some blame as well. There’s no retconning of evil here. There’s the hint—and it’s only a hint for now—that Yoda may not be a blameless saint in the centuries-long march to Order 66. He may even have covered up a scandal or too in his time the way a shrewd political operator might. And why not? Surely a millennium of peace and justice is worth a few secrets between Jedi Masters.

I repeat: While Yoda presided on the Jedi Council for centuries, Darth Plagueis and his apprentices flourished, culminating in Darth Sidious, Darth Maul, and Darth Tyranus. The defections from the Jedi were accumulating one after another in the decades leading to Anakin’s training—this is canon already by Episode II, since that film reveals that Yoda trained Tyranus (i.e., Count Dooku) before he in turn trained Qui-Gon, left the Order, and joined Sidious—which raises the question: How long had such defections been occurring, and why wasn’t the alarm being sounded more widely? The fact that the Stranger turns out to have been a former Padawan of Vernestra’s, a fact known to Yoda, is neither revisionism nor deconstruction: it’s a logical deduction. It’s putting a name where a blank used to be.

True, The Acolyte is now part of a story meant to fill in the gaps between Plagueis, whom we learn about in Episode III, and the “vergence in the Force” mentioned in Episode I, namely Anakin’s miraculous birth without a human father. I suppose that makes it one more prequel connected to the Skywalker Saga. But in this case is that so bad? It makes narrative sense that Plagueis had false starts and mixed results in his attempts to create and sustain life with midi-chlorians alone. Osha and Mae appear to have been part of the run-up to Anakin. Given Palpatine and Dooku’s respective ages in the prequels, this show is only a few decades out from their births and thus only a couple more from their turning to the Dark Side. The question now is who ends up killing Plagueis: the Stranger, Osha, or Palpatine. If not Palpatine, then we might actually see it happen on screen. (It could be Osha who takes on Palpatine as an acolyte, not Plagueis—now there’s some double-barrelled retconning.)

Turning back to the show itself, let me note a few more virtues and reconsiderations, given my boredom and annoyance just a few weeks back.

First, I reiterate my affection for Lee Jung-jae as Sol. What I wasn’t prepared for was coming to appreciate Rebecca Henderson’s performance. Vernestra seemed both boring and bored in early episodes. I now see that she was meant to embody the cynical self-interest of the decadent Jedi, running in notable parallel with the nameless imperial bureaucrats scrambling for patronage, status, and safety in Andor. She’s not meant to be cool or likable. She’s the very reason the Jedi fall, and the Republic with them. I should have been more patient.

Second, I thought the finale was expertly made. I’ll even go so far as to say that the lightsaber duel between Sol and the Stranger struck me as the most creative, distinctive, unique Jedi action choreography put on film since the fight between Obi-Wan, Qui-Gon, and Maul in The Phantom Menace. That’s 25 years, y’all! (The only rival is the throne room scene in Episode VIII, but that isn’t a lightsaber duel; it’s two Force- and lightsaber-wielding fighters facing off against Snoke’s Praetorian Guard.) Too often lightsaber duels are little more than glorified sword fights. But these are wizards! Who can do magic! Who can float and fly and manipulate objects through space, including their own bodies! Where’s the creativity? We saw it on display in this episode, with more than one nod to Hong Kong action cinema. Kudos to Hanelle M. Culpepper, the director.

Kudos also to the composer, Michael Abels. The music and cinematography were finally atmospheric; they made you feel something, rather than serving as so much visual and aural wallpaper for “made-for-TV Star Wars.” Lee sells the hell out of his anguish, inner turmoil, and (even in the end) refusal to accept responsibility and insistence on his own innocence, his own righteousness. No one can doubt his good intentions, but he did in fact invade a secluded town, woo a child away from it, kill her mother, lie about it, and maintain a decade-long cover-up.

It’s for this reason, third, that I buy Osha’s turn, even if her acting doesn’t sell it the way Lee’s does. The one man she looked up to for so long not only kept the truth from her the whole time; he himself killed her mother. That shattering moment shatters her whole world. How could it not? Everything else he told her must be a lie. The Jedi rejected her, after all. The Stranger hasn’t lied once. Sol becomes collateral damage, even as his death at her hands is a point of no return. She’s committed. She’ll be trained. She’ll become an Acolyte to the Sith.

Now, do I take back what I wrote previously about the way they should have told this story? No. This was always the right story to tell, but it took them too long to get there, and they should never have told it from the vantage of the Jedi Temple and its inner workings. It should have been from Mae and Osha’s viewpoint from the start. Nor were all eight episodes of the season equally successful. Two, four, and six (if I recall) were duds. One, three, and five range from solid to good. And seven and eight were excellent. Perhaps, if there’s a second season, they can build on this momentum and keep the quality high. It doesn’t hurt that we can begin the season from Osha and Plagueis’ perspective, rather than starting all over again.

Having said all that, the fundamental question posed by my last post was this: Does The Acolyte once and for all confirm, in conjunction with other established Star Wars canon, that the Dark Side is definitively stronger than the Light? So that it remains an utter mystery how the Jedi remained in power for so long? Yes, it does. The question remains. This show won’t answer it. But perhaps another one—or a film, like James Mangold’s Dawn of the Jedi—will. My hope is now nonzero.

Mea culpa.

Sith > Jedi

Through five of eight episodes, The Acolyte is a middling failure—and a failure because it is middling. Of everything Star Wars needed, the very last was one more showdown between the Jedi and a mysterious Sith shrouded in darkness, a long drawn-out unveiling and encounter shot without beauty or grandeur or style or grandness of scope. What a bore.

Oh well. Three more thoughts before we finish the series then immediately forget it ever existed.

First: In the lead-up to the show, the buzz was that it would be a story told from the Sith’s perspective, that is, from the vantage point of powerless partisans of the Dark Side at the tail end of a millennium-long unchallenged reign by the Jedi. That’s an interesting idea! Why wasn’t this exact story told in that way? Never in the hallways of Jedi power; never looking at the Sith or his acolyte through Jedi eyes; always, instead, looking at the Jedi aslant, from an angle, burning with furious resentment. In this way the aha-reveal wouldn’t be a Sith under a mask, but the epiphany of actual Jedi in all their boring beige glory—come to steal children, enforce galactic edicts, and kill with impunity. Why did no one think this the better route?

Second: If Disney wants to make quality Star Wars (on either the big or the small screen), they have to commit to top-tier casting. Cast a show the way HBO does. Don’t cast tweens and newbies. Don’t cast on the cheap. Get the best of the best. The only way this works is if the actors on screen have gravitas. Most of the actors on this show, like Kenobi and Boba Fett before it, look like third billing in a spin-off DC comics movie. Follow Andor’s lead and make every actor who has even a single line of dialogue someone who could win an Emmy—someone who could steal the show. (Make them human, too, by the way.) As it is, we get stilted dialogue performed by teens and twentysomethings who look like it’s their big break following a string of guest appearances on the CW. And it’s Disney, I remind you, that’s footing the bill. They’ve got the cash.

Third: Does this show prove once and for all that, canonically, the Dark Side is more powerful than the Light? Ignore Episode IX, since it never happened. Across eight movies, nearly every time a Jedi fights a Sith head-to-head (or a Force-wielding opponent in touch with the Dark Side, since neither Snoke nor Kylo Ren are Sith), the Jedi loses. Darth Maul defeats Qui-Gon Jinn and, at least in terms of lightsaber combat, Obi-Wan too. Dooku defeats Anakin and Obi-Wan both before fighting Yoda to a draw. Palpatine beats Yoda. Anakin may lose to Obi-Wan, but he “wins” in Episode IV and wins again in Episode V against Luke. Luke bests Anakin only by tapping into his anger (i.e., the Dark Side); Palpatine then defeats Luke; and Anakin in turn destroys Palpatine. In other words, this particular Sith loses not to a Jedi but to a fellow Sith—his own apprentice.

It turns out that, with the exception of Obi-Wan in his prime against an Anakin lacking any training in the Sith arts—having turned to the Dark Side mere hours earlier—the Jedi are no match for the Sith. The Sith are simply too powerful. The Dark Side appears to be the stronger side of the Force, and by a wide margin, whatever its moral content. (Note further that the Jedi themselves teach, as doctrine, that the Force as such is amoral; what it seeks, and what the universe wants, is balance, not for the extinction of the Dark by the Light.)

To its credit, The Acolyte confirms and extends this canonical pattern. In doing so, it raises questions it will surely avoid, such as why the viewer should root for the Jedi; why the Light is preferable to the Dark Side; why, post-Rey, anyone should have confidence that the Dark will not return and prevail; and how, pre-Palpatine, the Sith and the Dark Side alike were dormant, or even nonexistent, for a thousand years.

Star Wars has written its canon into a corner. Leslye Headland isn’t going to write it out. That falls to someone else. I have my doubts such a person exists. And even if they did, I wouldn’t hold my breath that Disney would hire or empower them to tell the only story that needs telling.

Update (5 minutes later): I realize, upon pressing “publish,” that this post is, unwittingly but unsurprisingly, one long apologia for Rian Johnson and The Last Jedi. IYKYK.

But seriously: I forgot to mention that Rey and Ren fight to a draw; that Rey is powerless before Snoke; and that only Ren can defeat Snoke. Which only furthers the point. Not to mention that Snoke converts Ren from the Light to the Dark and that Ren rebels against Luke—a Jedi Master!—thereby casting him away into exile and self-incurred defeat, even if also (at the end, through Rey) toward a sort of self-immolating victory. Had Kathleen Kennedy permitted Rian Johnson or some equally brilliant screenwriter to follow the lines he’d drawn where they were pointing (that is, in the climactic ninth film), all this would have already been resolved, since the question at the heart of the above post is the question at the heart of Episode VIII. Asked but, on principle, unanswered by Kennedy, Abrams, et al. Oh well. Maybe that was their signal that it never would be. So it goes.

The Acolyte

1. Lee Jung-jae as Sol is A+. A precursor to Liam Neeson’ Qui-Gon Jinn. Check.

2. Charlie Barnett as Yord, aka “but what if a Jedi Knight were a tool?,” is a great call. Even from the commercials you could see the stilted self-regard, which out of context presented as CW-quality acting, but in context is a nice in-universe joke. The Jedi are the worst! And Yord is the worst of the worst.

3. I’m fine with the twins plot, not least given the Sith’s Rule of Two and the Light and Dark sides of the Force. Already in the first episode we’re hearing about this, plus the episode titles make the subtext text. Will Amandla Stenberg’s characters be anything more than a literal outworking of this metaphor on screen? TBD.

4. I’m curious as to the show’s depiction of the Jedi’s inner workings. Are they sclerotic and bureaucratic? Or democratic and therefore unhurried (if possibly too slow to meet the urgency of the moment)? If the latter, then they are more like the Ents, and thus to be admired. If the former, then we’re back with Qui-Gon and d-e-c-a-d-e-n-c-e. But if the former because the latter, well, then you’re just making Palpatine’s argument for him.

5. I do not mind at all (unlike Alan Sepinwall) that the decadence, sclerosis, and institutional blindness on evidence in the prequels is already evident here, a century before the Empire. These things takes time. Moreover, Qui-Gon will be born some fifty years after the events of this show, and there will be living memory of whatever transpires in the rest of the series when he’s being trained as a child in Coruscant. I am eager to see whether Leslye Headland et al can make thematic or narrative hay of these matters beyond “Palpatine-versus-the-Jedi avant la lettre.”

6. See further Timothy Burke on the difficulty of nailing down the Sith’s concrete motivations in Star Wars lore.

7. There are intriguing hints. “Our political enemies” says one Jedi to another. Who are they? What do they want? What is their brief? But these questions raise a whole new set of questions, as does The Acolyte as a whole…

8. Boil them all down this: How is it possible that the Jedi kept the Republic from war for a thousand years? Remember, Star Wars is not a Star Trek: this isn’t meant to be utopian. Life isn’t perfect. Greed and lust and wrath and gluttony and pride and all the other sins prevail; the Republic is not the Federation. This isn’t communism minus Lenin and Stalin. It’s just ordinary civilizational life projected onto the stars. How, I repeat, was there absolutely zero war—no conflict beyond the local, the petty, the private—for a full millennium? Across how many solar systems in an entire galaxy? Even contained on a single planet? None, zero, zilch? Are we committed, canonically, to this necessarily and strictly being true? For real?

9. Now think about the Jedi. They are a tiny religious minority of celibate wizards who forsake emotional attachment, are taken from their families while very young to be trained by a secret order on the galactic capital planet, wield magic spells at a whim, brandish laser swords, and carry an imperial (sorry, republican-senatorial) remit to investigate, subdue, arrest, and (if necessary) kill any and all suspected of breaking the law or making trouble. In effect, Jedi are medieval monks, knights, and sheriffs, all in one. They leave family behind, they neither marry nor have sex nor have children or households, yet they possess occult powers that intimidate and discipline a galactic population of trillions. How, I ask once again, did such a tiny, terrifying, and unrepresentative group preserve, much less enforce, peace and justice in the galaxy? As Obi-Wan remarks at one point in the prequels, the Jedi are not soldiers. Who wouldn’t feel burning resentment at these magical universe policeman? “The Jedi live in a dream,” the acolyte’s master says. I’m inclined to agree.

10. I failed to mention that, in this galaxy, there is no God, only the Force. No one worships the Force, not exactly. The Force has servants and students (a la Chirrut Îmwe), but the Force itself is neither good nor evil, only the balance of the two. Why should any ordinary people “believe in” the Force, or respect or admire or even care about it? And by extension, the Jedi?

11. I suppose a postmodern debunking of Obi-Wan’s “more civilized age” as just so much nostalgic hokum could be interesting. But I’d prefer a deeper answer on this score. Even during the Jedi’s (and by extension, the Republic’s) high tide of peace, politics was never extinguished. What was going on? How did they preserve it? By what maneuverings? With what shenanigans? Who, after all, initiated the Jedi doctrines about detachment, much less celibacy? Are they necessary? Or are they part of the problem? And thus part of what led to Sidious, Maul, Anakin, Snoke, Ren? Could Rey’s new Jedi order correct for these past mistakes, as Rian Johnson’s film implied? If Disney makes good on a new series of films focusing on her efforts—as well as a biblical epic, directed by James Mangold, depicting the Jedi’s origins in the distant past—could these form a kind of narrative thread, even an inclusio, centering less on Luke and Leia’s family drama and more on the High Republic’s failures, the Jedi’s decadence, and Palpatine and Qui-Gon’s shared critique of the status quo? In order too forestall repeating history, which would doom the galaxy (and moviegoers) to an endless cycle of Sith/Dark-versus-Jedi/Light?

12. Fat chance. But in theory, it could work.

23 thoughts on The Phantom Menace

Twenty-five years ago I saw Episode I with a childhood best friend in the theater that sits at the entrance to Universal Studios in Orlando, Florida; last night I saw the re-release with my sons at the Alamo Drafthouse in Austin, Texas. I’ve got thoughts.

1. No matter its potential, no matter the what-might-have-beens, no matter the revisionist reviews or retconning or retrievals, three things were always going to keep TPM from being a great Star Wars film: (a) an eight-year-old Anakin; (b) unnecessary narrative nostalgia; and (c) cutesy cartoon schmaltz. We now have forty years’ worth of evidence that these decisions were not departures from the vision of George Lucas, but part and parcel of it. To change course, he would have had to listen to outside voices suggesting that Anakin be eighteen, not eight; that Anakin not be the original builder of C-3PO; that Jar Jar and Watto and Sebulba and “sleemo” and “doo-doo” and ha-ha neighborhood Tatooine slave children taunting “Ani” are neither funny nor endearing, including to actual children. But Lucas doesn’t believe in listening to others, here in his galaxy above all. So there’s no sliding doors moment where Episode I is truly excellent; it was always going to be hamstrung from the start.

2. A partial addition to this list is Lucas’s obsession with “cutting edge” CGI, which everyone but him knows ceases to be cutting edge the moment the car drives off the lot. On re-watch, though, had the film lacked the above three items of dead weight without cutting the gratuitous CGI, it could have held up. So long as the animated characters weren’t cartoonish or racist(!)—a big “if”—then TPM would have been like Terminator 2 or Jurassic Park or Fellowship of the Ring. The “dated” graphics aren’t dated at all: they’re remarkable testaments to digital artistry. Rather than what they became, which is testaments to Lucas’s softness for silliness.

3. A friend told me years ago that a professor of his ruined The Godfather for him by pointing out Diane Keaton’s acting in it. Allow me to suggest that Natalie Portman is the Kay Adams of The Phantom Menace—indeed, of all three prequel trilogy episodes. She’s not exactly spectacular or awful, the way Hayden Christensen is on screen and going for it and not quite succeeding but still, you know, doing a thing. It’s a void, an absence, a null. She’s a non-presence in every single scene. I’m happy to blame Lucas for this instead of Portman, both for his direction and for his writing of the character. (Portman is, after all, a very accomplished actor outside of Star Wars, which was one reason to be excited about her casting!) Nevertheless one-half of the Skywalker twins’ parentage is a zero in our introduction to her. A lost opportunity.

4. The only time Portman is half-alive is when she “plays” her own double on Tatooine and repeatedly butts heads with Liam Neeson’s Qui-Gon Jinn. But then, the entire handmaiden/queen ruse and its “reveal” is goofy to begin with. I wonder how it played with adults at the time. I vaguely recall being surprised in 1999, yet minus any payoff. The only narrative logic is that it allows Lucas to put Portman in town with Neeson when they meet and befriend Anakin and his mother Shmi. Otherwise it’s a dead end.

5. Given the furor it caused at the time, I have to admit that, on re-watch these many years later, with so many shows and film and canon filled out, I don’t mind the Midi-chlorians one bit. It’s actually rather elegantly done, I must say. Begone, haters! Hier stehe ich und kann nicht anders.

6. There are other clunky bits, not least just about everything related to the Gungans as well as the deep-sea adventure through the planet’s core, plus some of the Trade Federation politics- and alien-speak (again, those accents are shameful). That said … like all the other revisionists, I can’t hate this movie, and there’s a lot to appreciate, even love. Let me count the ways.

7. Neeson’s Qui-Gon is not only a home run: well conceived, well written, and well executed. He may be one of Lucas’s greatest creations. He commands every scene. He’s always in his own skin, comfortable where others are not. His simultaneous uncertainty, confusion, confidence, and resolve are palpable. The hints at his past and his running conflict with the Council are expertly deployed in their ambiguity. He has chemistry with everyone: with Portman, with Ewan McGregor, with Jake Lloyd, with Pernilla August. Neeson somehow single-handedly elevates this movie from forgettable to memorable, at least when he’s on screen (which is a lot). All this is not even to mention the moral gray that Lucas leans into with Qui-Gon. I lost count how many times Neeson lies to someone’s face without a trace of regret. He gambles without promise of gain and doesn’t even stop to inform the queen. What a character! What a performance!

8. Did I mention that Qui-Gon was dead right about the Jedi and the Republic? About its sclerosis, decay, and internal rot? About its detachment from the common good? About its aristocratic self-regard and blindness to the evil in its midst? Neither Yoda nor Mace Windu could see Palpatine standing right in front of them. Palpatine made sure his apprentice killed the only one who might recognize him before it was too late.

9. (This point and the next two relate also, by the way, to The Last Jedi. Rian Johnson understood that Luke had to come to terms, on screen, with the “intra-Jedi” debate between Palpatine, Qui-Gon, Obi-Wan, and Yoda. In a sense, Luke—through Ren—had to mature beyond Yoda and Obi-Wan’s vacillating optimism and despair in favor of something less childish, less binary, less yin and yang, without succumbing to the Dark Side. That maturity goes unspoken in the film, but its name is Qui-Gon. Had Episode IX been made by someone as shrewd as Johnson, Rey’s journey and continuation of the Jedi would have made explicit this callback all the way to Episode I: “a new start” for “a new Jedi,” open to the wisdom and worldly good sense of a Qui-Gon Jinn.)

10. Qui-Gon wasn’t just right about the Jedi; he was also right about Anakin, assuming he was indeed the Chosen One (a contestable proposition, I admit). Even if he was wrong about the prophecy, or rather ensured the truth of the prophecy by tragically ensuring Anakin’s training, he was right to see promise and potential in Anakin and the Council was wrong to treat a third-grade child—to his face—like his sadness and fear, after leaving his home and mother behind, were such a psychological obstacle to his learning the Force that they would rather him suffer humiliating rejection before the highest sages of the land. Hm, I’m sure that would have bode well for the virginally conceived Jesus of Midi-chlorian Force powers. They sealed their fate, and confirmed Qui-Gon’s worst fears about them, in that very room, by that very decision. It’s a miracle that Anakin ever repents at all, given his experiences.

11. Think again about those experiences. He’s conceived without a father’s involvement. He’s a slave from early childhood. He leaves his mother before his tenth birthday. He joins an order that not only keeps him from ever visiting his still-enslaved mother for a full decade but also refuses to use their power, influence, and wealth—not to mention their lightsabers—to liberate her from a slavery that the Republic itself outlaws! Oh, and the Jedi also require lifelong abstinence, forbidding marriage and children. Later, Anakin will return on his own to Tatooine to find his formerly enslaved mother kidnapped, tortured, and raped by Tusken Raiders. He will murder all of them for this. Later still, Anakin’s secret wife, secretly pregnant, will die, in part as a result of his lashing out at her with the Force. Then he will be led to believe that his unborn child died with her. Then he will learn that his son lived, but this knowledge was kept from him both by his current master (Palpatine) and by his old master (Obi-Wan)—all surrogate fathers who failed him. Then he will learn that his son has a twin sister, likewise kept from him. Then he will fight and nearly kill his son. Then he will kill his current master, having “killed” (or defeated) his old master, and ask his son for forgiveness before dying of his wounds. (Note: All three of Anakin’s surrogate fathers died as a result of apprenticing him.) Then he will look on from Force-ghost-world as his grandson turns to the Dark Side and murders his own father and nearly his own mother, even as Luke turns away from the force in despair and self-chosen exile. Then, finally, his grandson will join forces with (former Nabooian Senator) Palpatine’s granddaughter to destroy Palpatine himself—whom Anakin, somehow, failed actually to kill in his one and only good deed in life. Having killed Palpatine once and for all, Anakin’s grandson gives his life to save Palpatine’s granddaughter’s. And so the Skywalker blood line is complete: from Shmi to Anakin (and Padmé) to Luke and Leia (and Han) to Ben. Seven Skywalkers, all special, most Force sensitive, some Jedi, all dead and gone, and for what?

12. No, J. J. Abrams, Rey is not a Skywalker, even if she wants to claim the name. And yes, it occurs to me that one of Freddie deBoer’s best essays is a longer and much funnier version of the previous point. Go read him and weep/laugh.

13. Since I’m mentioning writers on these themes, see also Matt Zoller Seitz and Ross Douthat. And Freddie again, who is correct about The Last Jedi.

14. What else does Lucas get right? The politics, the decadence, the transition from planetary democracy to galactic democracy to galactic republic to galactic emergency to galactic empire. He also understands that the wider cinematic and narrative frame of Star Wars is not itself, his own prior creation, but the larger mythic and movie worlds of both Western and Eastern culture. Granting the moments of eye-rolling nostalgia and point-and-laugh coincidences, Star Wars has not (yet) become solipsistic at this time.

15. The music is flawless. Thank you, John Williams.

16. Lucas also nails multiple scenes and images, to the point that some of them remain iconic. The greatest of these is every single frame of the Darth Maul fight. I dissent from the view that Maul should have lived to fight another day; it was wise to kill him off. What makes the duel with Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon so compelling—somehow I’d never realized this—is that none of them ever speaks a word. In just about every climactic fight sequence in any action movie, the leads are in constant conversation: cajoling, insulting, persuading, begging. Not here. There’s nothing to talk about. It’s pure visual poetry. Few things filmed since then can match it.

17. Maul is a singular visual creation. You can’t help but stare. As for other characters, Obi-Wan is well written by Lucas and well acted by McGregor, as are Palpatine by Ian McDiarmid and Shmi Skywalker by Pernilla August. I was surprised how affecting August’s portrayal of Shmi is. The only pathos in the movie, with the possible exception of Obi-Wan’s grief over Qui-Gon, belongs to Shmi. She is worn down by the world, yet oddly hopeful, given her experience with Anakin’s miraculous conception and her love for him. She wants him to leave, even as she registers a moment’s hurt quickly covered over by a mother’s affection when she sees his forgetfulness, then remembrance, then acceptance at her remaining behind (as, the movie won’t let us forget, a slave).

August and Neeson share multiple moments together: knowing glances, light touches of arms and shoulders. Squint and you might see romantic tension. On this viewing I saw instead a kind of shared religious sensibility. They both relate to the Force the way Mary and Joseph relate to God. Like Joseph, Qui-Gon is a surrogate and adoptive father (also like Joseph, Qui-Gon dies before Anakin becomes an adult; unlike Jesus, Anakin has major daddy issues for the rest of his life, as do his son and grandson, Luke and Ben—apparently the only way for sons in Star Wars to exorcise their paternal demons is by slaying their father or dying themselves, or perhaps through handing on the line from multiples generations of failed father figures to an adopted daughter figure: this is the only reading of Rey I will allow). Note well that Shmi isn’t passive before Qui-Gon; rather, her fiat mihi is, like Mary’s, an active consent in response to a higher benign power. In this way Shmi and Qui-Gon alike are responsive to a kind of cosmic momentum sweeping them along. They see it, acquiesce to it, float along with it, even at great cost; in fact, at the cost of both of their lives.

18. I remain struck by the fact that when Lucas sat down to write Darth Vader’s backstory he made the child Anakin Skywalker a slave on a backwater planet. I must have seen The Phantom Menace at least a dozen times since 1999, but I had never registered the brief conversation at the Skywalker dinner table in which Anakin explains that all slaves on Tatooine have a chip implanted beneath their skin that (a) can’t be detected or removed by the slave himself and (b) marks them as a slave for life, lest they attempt to escape. This, in what is otherwise, in Lucas’s hands, a children’s fable! Anakin can’t run away, much less hop aboard starship, because his brutal slaveowners will track him down through the cybernetic chip implanted in his body!

Is this a kind of dark foreboding of Anakin’s eventual bodily disintegration and reintegration via robotic machinery? “More machine than man”? A man enslaved by his own passions, by his unchosen transhuman body, metal and circuitry rather than flesh and blood? A man overmastered by a Force he supposed he could manipulate to save the wife he eventually killed? All of which turned on his receiving freedom from slavery without his mother—a motherless origin at this, the source of the most famous “orphan’s tale” in American pop culture? Recall that, in the next film, Padmé comforts Anakin following his slaughter of men, women, and children among the Tusken Raiders, after they took and abused his mother (once she had herself been freed and married by a good man!). I lay all this out to show what was going on in Lucas’s mind as he sketched out the origins of Darth Vader. As seemingly light and occasionally cartoonish as Episode I can be, it has moments of such darkness it makes you gasp.

19. This is a movie about overconfidence. More than once different characters say, “You assume too much.” Or, “I promise you…” followed by an outlandish vow they can’t be sure they can keep or whose implications they can’t foresee. Even my beloved Qui-Gon comes under judgment here. No one knows anything—the only exception is the Sith, who see all. No one else has sight. Everyone is blind while presuming the indefinite persistence of the status quo. And it’s all about to come crashing down around their ears. This is the tragedy of the beginning of the story of Darth Vader. This is “the phantom menace” haunting the galaxy, haunting the Jedi, haunting the Republic, haunting Anakin and his many would-be fathers.

20. So no, I don’t mind the name, either. It’s both accurate and appropriately apt to the Saturday morning genre B-movie serials that influenced the original film.

21. Three final thoughts, each a missed opportunity. The first concerns slavery. Why not make that issue more prominent in the next two episodes? Why not make Anakin an abolitionist? Why not insinuate the issue into the Senate’s bureaucratic machinations and Padmé’s own frustrations? Why not send Anakin back to Tatooine to liberate the slaves—only to have his hand slapped by Coruscant, even to have the slaves returned to their masters by the august Republican Senate? And why not have Palpatine rise to the occasion, offering the power of emancipation to Anakin and Padmé in return for emergency wartime powers? After all, doesn’t he need the military might of the Republic to stamp down the Hutts and other slave-mongering forces? How did this not write itself?

22. Why not let Anakin lose the pod race? The race is well shot, but there’s no urgency or angst because we know he’ll win. What if he didn’t? What if a loss then put Qui-Gon in the position of stealing Anakin away, refusing to honor his bet with Watto and the Hutts? Qui-Gon would do it. And it would make him a hero in Anakin’s eyes, even as it made Anakin resentful and ashamed for having lost and furious at the now-villainous Council and Senate, which would politely instruct Qui-Gon to return Anakin to Tatooine. This plot line, too, writes itself.

23. Oh, Jar Jar. By which I mean: Darth Jar Jar. Do I buy the theory? I want to. And man, there really are odd aspects of TPM if Lucas truly had nothing up his sleeve with this character. His banishment, the fear he inspires in fellow Gungans, the suggestion that he will be punished or even killed once Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan depart, his occasional physical prowess and grace, his crucial role at key moments to catalyze the plot (such as hinting in Padmé’s ear that she should return to Naboo—moments after Palpatine whispers diabolical suggestions in her ear in the Senate—not to mention his fateful vote to make Palpatine Emperor in Episode III). Remember, too, that Palpatine is a Senator from Naboo, so it’s absolutely plausible that he and Jar Jar have had prior contact. He just “happens” to run into the Jedi and incur a life debt. Oh, and how does Darth Maul track Padmé’s ship to Tatooine if they never sent a transmission off world, but only received one? One option: Jar Jar himself found a way to send a transmission, alerting the Sith to their whereabouts.

The notion of doubles (“Always two there are”)—co-equal/rival pairs or even a kind of surreptitious self-doubling—is pronounced in TPM: Republic and Trade Federation, Senate and Council, Amidala and Padmé, Palpatine and Sidious, Sidious and Maul, Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan, Obi-Wan and Anakin. Why not Jar Jar and Darth Jar Jar?

As others have detailed, this would also explain Maul’s death and Count Dooku’s random appearance in his place; it was meant to be Count Jar Jar all along. Had the JJB character not been such a fantastic fiasco and embarrassment from day one, he might have been the Gollum of Star Wars: the first true and truly momentous CGI character, and a secret villain to boot. Was he? Was that the plan?

Maybe. Who knows. On this re-watch, aside from some of the narrative holes, it didn’t seem particularly likely. And it sure seems like we would have heard some leak from Lucasfilm in the last three decades spoiling the secret.

Chalk it up as one more might-have-been in this remarkable might-have-been of a movie.

Ahsoka

Start with the good:

• Charting a path to another galaxy.

• Bridging the gap from Episode VI and Mandalorian to the rise of the First Order in Episode VII.

• Bringing the animated characters of Rebels into real life.

• Dreams and memories and holograms of Anakin—a natural move, since he was Ahsoka’s master, and by this point in the timeline he’s been redeemed and died, without ever resolving his relationship to Ahsoka.

• Mary Elizabeth Winstead as Hera: of all the actors on the show, she’s got the most life in her eyes.

• Ray Stevenson as Baylan Skoll. Not only is the late Stevenson a commanding presence; his secret long game, whatever it is, is the only narratively compelling and unprefabricated part of the show.

• Genevieve O'Reilly as Mon Mothma, given her spectacular turn on the equally spectacular Andor—but only if she plays more than a minor role; that is, if Filoni et al have plans to continue and eventually finish that character’s arc, on this or another show, given that we don’t know her final fate.

• The general action choreography, including the space fights and (some of) the lightsaber duels. Kudos on the old school Samurai-esque solo-move kill by Ahsoka in her duel with Marrok.

Now for the middling:

• Rosario Dawson! Perfect for the role, and yet somehow she’s not quite clicked with the character. She clearly made the decision to play Ahsoka as contemplative, unemotional, patient to a fault. No spunk or flavor at all. Sometimes she, and thus the show, feels like it’s stuck in molasses. This was an unwise decision, to say the least.

• Not bringing back Zeb! Why? The hassle of a CGI character? The entire gang’s back together. Shouldn’t all of them constantly be asking one another why this old friend isn’t tagging along?

• Huyang and Chopper. Low-key or downer screen presence the both of them. Someone has got to bring some life and verge to the show, no?

• Ivanna Sakhno as Shin Hati. She’s aiming for the boiling-over-with-rage-and-desire-for-power Sith thing, but it only sometimes works. Just as often she just looks like she’s posing, and so trying too hard with nothing evident for the viewer to care about in the character’s nature or motivations.

• Lars Mikkelsen as Thrawn. I’m withholding judgment on this one until the finale airs. I read the original Thrawn trilogy by Timothy Zahn thirty years ago, so it’s a pleasure to watch a live-action Thrawn on a bona fide Star Wars show with my sons in the year 2023. Neither Mikkelsen’s acting nor Thrawn’s depiction so far is a disappointment. But it hasn’t blown me away yet either. The show needs to make good on this guy as a—the—Big Bad of this stretch of time in the canon, a villain on a par with Vader and Palpatine and Kylo Ren and Maul. Stick the landing, people!

And the bad:

• Natasha Liu Bordizzo as Sabine Wren is a dud. Close behind is Eman Esfandi as Ezra Bridger. Not only did these characters need to pop, their chemistry—with each other, with Ahsoka, with anyone and everyone—needed to function as the beating heart of the show. Unfortunately the opposite is the case.

• The eye-rolling hero’s welcome for C-3PO. My word. Not only does the fan service need to stop. The excuses for why neither child of Anakin Skywalker can’t find it within themselves to come join the action are getting old. Kennedy, Favreau, and Filoni made a tactical error when Solo scared them off from re-casting the Original Trilogy characters. So now we’re stuck with either bad CGI recreations of a young Mark Hamill or a stage-left fanfare appearance of Leia’s droid envoy—instead of just recasting the parts and letting these fictional characters show up and do stuff, as they unquestionably would have in such a story. Oh well.

• The sequel-to-a-show-most-viewers-haven’t-watched problem. This was the one nut needing cracking, and Filoni wasn’t up to the task. There were creative ways around this. Why not do something unexpected and actually film key scenes from Rebels in live action, with the newly cast actors? Either for flashbacks or even for a kind of mini-movie that might serve as a prologue or prelude to the show itself? How cool! Fun for the fans of Rebels, fun (and necessary) spadework for new viewers. A win win. Instead we’re deluged by exposition and vague references to the past, a past we’re made to know is Heavy and Sad because we saw melancholy faces reflecting silently about mostly unidentified things that happened on a children’s animated show that premiered almost a decade ago!

• The story itself. The real story begins to ramp up in the second half of the series, which makes the first four episodes pure build-up. This was a mistake. It’s clear to any viewer watching this show that it’s just a launching-pad, or segue, into a larger story—the real one, the “star war” against the fledgling New Republic as led by Thrawn and his imperial remnant—a story whose conclusion we’re going to have to wait years to see. Even if it culminates in a fantastic theatrical film by Filoni (I’ll be there, I always am), this series will have proved to be nothing more than a stepping stone, when it could have been an interesting stand-alone story, far more than a bridge. Perhaps the finale this Tuesday will prove me wrong, but I have my doubts.

Out of touch

Before they premiered, I assumed that both House of the Dragon and The Rings of Power would flop. The assumption was pure projection. I couldn’t gin up an ounce of interest in either. Why? Because they were both inessential prequels produced entirely for reasons having to do with the bottom line, i.e., competing corporations spending hundreds of millions of dollars in the service of diminishing returns from previously profitable IP. Did anyone ask for them? Are they answering some urgent question about the fantasy worlds or original stories told about them? No. HBO wanted more of that sweet sweet GRRM cash, and Bezos wanted his own GRRM, so he opted to buy the next best thing: the rights to JRRT.

Clearly I was wrong. Both shows were enormous “hits,” in the sense that millions of people watched them and, apparently, cared about what happened on them. I confess it felt a little like going through the motions, watching from the outside; the precaps and recaps, podcasts and explainers, reviews and “arguments.” Do people actually enjoy these shows, or are they playing the old hits, reliving the glory days of Peter Jackson’s films and the initial shock and awe of Benioff and Weiss’s show?

But I may be wrong, since I was wrong the first time. What the popularity of these series showed me is just how out of touch I am. It was a pleasant surprise. Once upon a time, the mere existence of these shows and their accompanying buzz would have made them irresistible to me. No more. And thank God.

*

My rule with TV, as I’ve written about before, is that it either needs to be weightless fun (Top Chef, Great British, Brooklyn 99) or an A/A+ (Better Call Saul, Succession, Mare of Easttown). My students have time for C+ and B– shows. I once did too—or I thought I did: the truth is, there’s always something better to do with your time—but no longer. An episode or two of TV per week works for me. I can certainly do with less. More, and I should reconsider my priorities.

So regarding the other big franchise premiere this fall, Andor, I stayed away. I’ll eventually consider checking out HOTD or TROP if people are saying either show is genuinely A-level headed into season 4. Until then, it’s just a waste of time. But friends have been telling me that Andor is worth the time, so I finally gave it a watch this week. Some habits never die, and this childhood Star Wars fan is a sucker for more time in the galaxy.

And it’s not bad! It’s actually quite good, and getting better with each episode. A far cry from the useless, boring redundancy that was Kenobi. Some thoughts on the first eight episodes:

• True to his word, Tony Gilroy has made what appear to be four mini-movies, each made up of three episodes. I wish this had led to greater formal experimentation. What if the season actually were four movies, and edited accordingly, rather than randomly sliced and diced episodes? The opening three in particular feel random in when and how they begin and end. One more example of a filmmaker not quite understanding the television medium.

• Having said that, “movement two” (i.e., the arc spanning episodes 4-6) is magnificent, and if episode 9 delivers, then the third movement will be too. You can feel the Gilroy-ness of it all (brother Dan is writing as well). They’re in their element with the plotting, characters, and intrigue. It may well be the first successful live-action depiction of these things. Even Rogue One was beset by the dual shadow, on one hand, of Vader and the Force, and on the other, of our knowledge of the Death Star, its plans, and its eventual destruction. The mini-dramas of “BBY 5” and these heretofore unknown characters (minus Mon Mothma and Andor, only one of whose fate we know—we’ll think of her as Kim and him as Jimmy for now) have no canonical future for viewers. Their simultaneously small and large stakes create wonderful narrative tension.

• By contrast to the other Star Wars shows so far, the acting has been uniformly excellent. No comedic guest stars, no amateurs doing their damndest to make gibberish sound profound. Gilroy hiring top-notch old British guys and letting them chew scenery is just what the doctor ordered. Even smaller parts like Fiona Shaw’s adoptive mother lend gravitas that, in their absence, would make the show feel small and forced.

• The show is at its best, surprisingly, on Coruscant and inside the walls of the infinitely byzantine corridors of the immaculately white Imperial Security Bureau. (Cue Melville on the whiteness of the whale.) Kyle Soller, Alex Ferns, Denise Gough, Anton Lesser, and Genevieve O'Reilly are brilliant in their roles, and Gilroy et al give them both the words and the direction to make it all feel far more than glorified galactic dress-up. Whereas whole stretches of Kenobi felt like low-rent TV—“where’s the money???”—most of Andor makes clear exactly where the money went. Who knew Star Wars minus wizards and laser swords could be fun?

• The weakest link so far is the titular lead. Diego Luna plays Andor as a twitchy, world-weary, unsmiling Han Solo. All exposed nerve and bitter anger. That’s fine. But it drains him of any charisma. He’s supposed to be a womanizer. But who would want to go near this guy? He seems brittle and sketchy, not alluring or mysterious. Clearly he’s playing the role “correctly”—in the seventh episode, we understand why the stormtrooper stops him (however unjustly): Cassian Andor always wears a guilty look on his face, as if he’s only one step ahead of the law (which he is). His tell is his nervous constant surveillance of his own person. In that sense, Luna is doing his job. But why should we, the audience, care? We’ve got to have a reason at some point. When he vanished for a full 15-20 minutes in a later episode, I didn’t miss him at all. I wanted to stay on Coruscant with Mothma and Luthen and the rest. Make him matter, Gilroys!

• Having said that, Luna was quite impressive in episode 8, in which, from memory, Andor basically lacks a single line of dialogue, except to repeat, over and over, his own false name to judges, stormtroopers, pilots, and prison guards. The dawning realization of his situation in prison is almost feral in its raw bodily expression. The addition of Andy Serkis was a grace note in an otherwise brutal episode. If what we’ve got waiting for us in episode 9 is one long masterfully executed prison break, I’m here for it.

• The real weakness of the series so far is its opening three episodes. I understand why something like the story they sketch was necessary, but again, I think something more formally interesting could have served the show’s purposes much better. What if, for example, the show began with season 4, in media res, with the viewer as clueless about who Andor is and why he’s there as any of the other rebels? Then you fill in the back story at the necessary moments, when other characters are also learning these things for the first time, surprised when they are surprised (as when he reveals he’s a mercenary, for example), all while stretching out the suspense of the planning and undertaking of the robbery and escape. You scrape away the fat of those first 105 minutes while filling in the gaps in a much more engaging way. You also do away with some of the pro forma “yes, this is the backstory for the guy whose backstory we’re telling in this prequel” paint-by-numbers feel of the opening episodes, which surely turned many viewers away from what quickly becomes a richly suspenseful story of empire, law, bureaucracy, sedition, criminality, justice, morality, politics, and spycraft.

• I do hope Gilroy is able to make season 2. It would be a bust if the low viewership of season 1 led to premature cancellation. If season 2 really does stretch from BBY 4 to, more or less, the opening scene of Rogue One, that could be an absolute blast in the right hands—and so far, these are the right hands. Here’s hoping Kathleen Kennedy agrees.

The issue with Kenobi

It’s not that it’s especially good or especially bad. It’s not that it’s revisiting a time period we’ve seen before. It’s not that it involves old characters and a fair bit of retconning.

It’s not that we’re back on Tatooine (for an episode). It’s not that we see kid Luke or kid Leia. It’s not that Hayden Christiansen is behind the mask (or in flashbacks). It’s not that the stakes are lower than usual. It’s not even that it’s serialized TV rather than a movie—though that’s close.

It’s that it feels like TV. It isn’t cinematic: in scope, in style, in ambition, in storytelling. Both its visual grammar (on the screen) and its literal grammar (on the page) are fit for the age of binging and streaming, not for a once-in-a-lifetime must-see cultural event.

There are no stunning landscapes. There is no moving music or even a memorable theme. The action is indistinguishable from other generic CGI-fests today, only somehow smaller. Even with the deep Disney pockets and the Star Wars brand, the show feels like it was made on the cheap: on soundstages, before green screens, with small crews, smaller casts (regular and extra), yet without the modest grandeur of The Mandalorian manufactured by StageCraft.

Compare with Top Gun Maverick, which for all its “legacy sequel” status is so big, so impressive, so jaw-on-the-floor awesome that it’s already the biggest hit in Tom Cruise’s 40-year career. It bends your will into submission by virtue of nothing so much as its self-confidence as pure spectacle.

By contrast, there is neither spectacle nor patience in Obi-Wan Kenobi, no pregnant pauses or non-filler geography. The editing is ho-hum. Viewers find themselves in the land of close-ups, the default setting of television cinematography. No one is winning any awards for this show.

That’s it. That’s the problem. Ewan McGregor is doing yeoman’s work, as ever. Kid Leia is cute. I didn’t mind the Anakin flashback. Nor do I mind looking to the animated series as a template here. But that template is for character, canon, and nuances of character. The visual, aural, and storytelling template is 1977—full stop.

Whether or not the finale lands the plane without eye-rolling, nostalgia bombs, or massive canon-revision—that is, even if the last episode doesn’t ruin anything in the OT and actually turns out to add a thing or two—it will still not have been worth the effort. Kennedy, Favreau, Filoni, et al have to start thinking bigger. They have to start unleashing their writers and directors while resisting, at all costs, the siren song of a Star Wars analogue to the Marvel in-house style, which is no style at all.

The worst eventuality here is not to make something bad, a la Episode II. The far greater sin is to make something boring, even forgettable. And I expect to have forgotten this series by year’s end.

An alternative Episode IX crawl

Yesterday I wrote about Episode VIII. Unfortunately, we never saw the promise of that great film fulfilled in a sequel that continued its themes and narrative arc. Instead, we got Episode IX, which was dead on arrival.

When I wrote about IX two years ago—a lot of words, by the way—I mentioned an idea for an alternative crawl that would have opened a much different, far better capstone to the Star Wars trilogy of trilogies. I did have an idea, and a good one, if I’m to be trusted; but I’ve since forgotten it. Thinking about VIII yesterday got thinking about IX again, though, so I thought I’d try my hand at that crawl (which, on Earth-2 and/or in the divine mind, not only exists but is followed by an actual Episode IX film written and directed by none other than Rian Johnson). Here it is:

Princess Leia has died.
Her body lies in state on Naboo
during an armistice granted by Kylo Ren,
Supreme Leader of the FIRST ORDER.

As a grateful galaxy gathers to mourn,
Rey, first of a new order of Jedi Knights,
calls together leaders of the RESISTANCE
to prepare a daring attack on Ren’s faltering rule.

But Rey has just received a shocking message.
Kylo Ren wants to meet her—alone—on
the mysterious planet of Myrkr. Is it a trap?
Old friends and new allies assemble to offer
counsel that will decide the fate of the galaxy . . .

The most important thing about an alternative Episode IX—call it alt-IX—is that it avoid Palpatine, Rey’s lineage, and digitally reconstructed Leia. Instead, the way to honor Carrie Fisher’s legacy and abrupt passing would be to explicitly mourn her in the film’s opening. Create a visually and aesthetically impressive funeral for a royal figure. Moreover, let that opening funeral be a hinge for the plot. First, in that it throws our heroes (Rey and Poe especially) off kilter. Second, though, in that it throws our Big Bad, Kylo Ren, even more off balance. Third and finally, in that it only adds to the poignant open-ended question at the close of The Last Jedi: Will ordinary peoples and systems across the galaxy rally to the side of the rebels against the First Order? Here, not only does the story of Luke’s heroism light a fire across the worlds; Leia’s passing calls them to their senses, and they show up en masse to mourn and remember and celebrate her. That presents both opportunities (now the Resistance has numbers on its side) and challenges (who can be trusted among all these new allies and would-be friends?).

As for Ren, he is shaken to the core by the death of his mother—remember, he couldn’t bring himself to kill her in VIII—and this only exacerbates his ill fit as Supreme Leader. Who wants Millennial Darth for a dictator? Besides, wasn’t Vader second to the Emperor? Dissension in the ranks, doubts about Ren’s true intentions, even rumors of spycraft and sabotage begin to unravel the First Order from within.

So Ren flees to Myrkr, a semi-canonical planet from the original Thrawn trilogy that is home to a species of animal that repels the Force. Think of them like Force vacuums; put enough of them in one place, and Force-users can neither feel nor use the Force. To meet Rey on such a planet offers a kind of neutral playing-field, where they can talk rather than fight.

I don’t have the whole film mapped out. In my mind, Rey goes in spite of her advisors’ wishes, in good faith; nor is Ren meaning to spring a trap. But her friends sabotage the meeting, to her surprise, even as Ren’s enemies, in his absence, enact a coup d’état. From there, battle lines as well as alliances are redrawn, and the fight to the finish is begun . . .

UPDATE: I’d forgotten one other idea (taken from my brother Mitch): If VII is about Finn learning not to run away (i.e., the vice of cowardice) and VIII is about Finn learning not to seek a glorious but meaningless death out of blind hatred (i.e., the vice of recklessness), IX needed to conclude his arc through his learning the virtue of courage through daring but prudent military leadership. And so what he does in alt-IX is sow the seeds of doubt and rebellion within and among the First Order’s storm troopers, who (as we know) are not clones but kidnapped and brainwashed orphan children. It is Finn, not Rey, who assumes command of the Resistance following the death of Han, Ackbar, Hondo, and Leia; and in the final battle, it is General Finn who directs the pincer movement of Poe’s squadrons and revolting storm troopers to seize control of the First Order’s home base of operations on some heavily fortified but centrally located planet. That planet in turn becomes New Coruscant, the staging ground for reconstructing oversight and governance by and for the New Republic, which did not and could not die with the destruction of a few planets (in VII), but survives in and beyond the pitiful reign of the First Order, now destroyed once for all.

Or so I imagine. Indulge me my fan-fic imaginings.

Interpreting The Last Jedi

I’m on record, and have been from the beginning, as a lover of Rian Johnson’s The Last Jedi. When I was on Twitter, I enjoyed having friendly—key word, that—debates with others about it. In fact, just last month I introduced myself to a senior academic at another institution, a person I’ve read but have never met before, and as he shook my hand he said, “Oh, I know who you are. You’re the one who thinks The Last Jedi is a good movie.”

Touché!

What I don’t enjoy, however, is the reception of the movie as filtered through the culture war. When that happens, the terms of the debate are prefabricated, overdetermined, and (worst of all) boring. All heat, no light.

But perhaps what’s most annoying is how shoddy so much conventional interpretation, pro and con, of the film is. It’s not just that people have good or bad opinions, more or less well reasoned. It’s that it’s not always clear they’ve seen the movie, or at least paid attention when they did (in the theater, once, four years ago).

So, granted that talking about talking about Star Wars is potentially insufferable and inescapably meta, here goes. Here is what The Last Jedi is and is not about; here is how (not) to talk about it.

1. “Let the past die. Kill it if you have to” is not the theme of the film. It is Kylo Ren’s view, which is not that of either Rey or Rian Johnson.

2. The theme, or one of the major themes, of the film is what one’s relationship to the past, and to venerable tradition, ought to be. Note that that theme is a question. Johnson is asking the audience, as he asks his characters (esp. Luke, Rey, Ren, Finn, and Leia), to decide what that relationship should be. He gives his answer, though you don’t have to agree with it. In a sense, the visceral reaction of a certain segment of fans to the film is itself their answer to the question. As Matt Zoller Seitz has observed, that means the question was one worth asking.

3. Neither Rey nor Luke ultimately answer the question the way Ren does. Luke is tempted to, but the trio of Rey, Leia, and Yoda change his mind.

4. Luke’s answer is not, however, to receive the past as it is; it is not a bare affirmation of the status quo ante; it is not to be silent about the errors and crimes of his forebears. To do that would only perpetuate the cycle he rightly perceives in the decadence of the Jedi: tradition for tradition’s sake; immunity to reform on principle. That way led to disaster.

5. Rey speaks from want and need, desire and innocence; she doesn’t have an argument to make, only an honest appeal for help. But Yoda does have an argument. Yoda understands that failure need not be absolute. Life follows death, good comes from loss, the young learn from the mistakes of the old. Sometimes a fire is cleansing—though purgation is far from pleasant. The same act (burning a tree, say) can come from opposed intentions: one to purify, the other to destroy. Luke’s impetuous urge to annihilate is a form of the latter; Yoda’s lightning from above, the former.

6. Note well: Yoda does not obliterate the sacred Jedi texts. He knows Rey took them when she left. Nor is he impugning them. He’s telling Luke that they have become for him nothing but “a pile of old books,” unread totems of a lost age worthy of little more than repudiation. Thus fossilized, they are useless for Luke, who has reached the end of his path. But not for Rey. She is a new start for the Jedi—one both continuous and discontinuous with the old order.

7. In short, The Last Jedi is about the sublimation of the past—of history, heritage, inheritance, and tradition—neither its rejection as wholly unworthy nor its pristine persistence into the future. Luke was the last Jedi; Rey now is the last Jedi: the eschatological Jedi, the last of the old and the first of the new. The Jedi will continue, though not without change. The blinkered self-regard and decadent haughtiness shall be no more. Padawans in the line of Rey will be Jedi, to be sure; but what it means to be a Jedi will not be the same as it was in the days before Palpatine.

8. Ren’s solution is wrong, therefore, because he believes that his past—his lineage—determines, must determine, who he is. And yet that lineage includes not only Anakin (himself redeemed before the end) but Han and Leia. That is why patricide and matricide are major themes of VII and VIII (following VI). His parents’ living goodness threatens his simultaneous act of self-creation and self-binding to Anakin’s turn to the Dark Side: he will make himself (in spite of his parents) through forced imitation (of his grandfather—not, note, his maternal grandmother!). Killing Snoke is his second act of patricide; the final duel with Luke seems, at first, to permit him the third and final stroke. But he’s robbed of the occasion, just as Vader was with Obi-Wan. He can’t kill the past: even when it dies, it lives on (“See you around kid”).

9. Whatever one thinks of Johnson’s handling of this theme (and I’ve not said anything about Finn or Leia, both of whom come to terms with their own past and its bearing on the future), the important thing to see is that it is an honest grappling with the story of the seven preceding films. It’s an honest reckoning with the through-line that runs across the prequel trilogy, original trilogy, and Abrams’ semi-remake sequel. The story of cyclical decadence and Jedi failure is the subtext of those seven Episodes, considered as a single narrative, and what Johnson does is make that subtext text. Luke comes to terms with one more Jedi Padawan rebelling and murdering his fellow students, having once more been seduced by the Dark Side, and like Obi-Wan and Yoda before him, he runs away into exile and the consolations of self-pity. And then he realizes this very dynamic, in self-conscious reflection, and decides to throw a spoke into the wheel: no more Jedi; no more cycles of Light versus Dark; no more high hopes dashed by devastating failure, and lives lost in the balance. This is where Luke is when the film opens, and it’s the only honest emotional and spiritual place for Luke to be in, given how The Force Awakens ended.

10. In that sense The Last Jedi is indeed a meta-reckoning, as a film, with Star Wars as such. The failure of interpretation is to see it as Johnson disliking Star Wars, either its story or its fans. Instead, it is Johnson putting Star Wars to the test, and seeing whether it will bend or break. The stress test is substantial, but after bending to the breaking point, it snaps back into place: Rey and Luke, together a sort of Jedi apocalypse, save the day; they fight back the First Order, deliver the Resistance from defeat, and light a spark that will burn through the galaxy, inspiring the apathetic and unbelieving to join the fight that will crush the remnants of the Empire once for all. Johnson, like everyone else, loves this franchise; like everyone else, he wanted his heroes to be heroes. But given the cards he was dealt, given the story he’d inherited, he couldn’t cheat. They had to earn it. And so they do.

At any rate, that’s what Episode VIII is about. It’s about other things too. It’s not perfect. And you don’t have to like it, whether or not you think Johnson succeeded in pulling off this particular set of themes. (I certainly don’t like Episode IX, which I prefer to pretend never happened.)

But there’s no question about what Johnson was trying to do; there’s no ambiguity about what the film is up to in this regard. So far as I can tell, there’s nothing to debate there. It can certainly be fun to argue over Star Wars. But only if we know what it is we’re talking about in the first place.

On Episode IX

Well, it happened. Abrams didn't even rise to his own best level. He capped off a 42-year cinematic saga with a stinker so bad that it sullies not only the new trilogy he helped to launch but his own reputation as a filmmaker.

I thought I'd avoid writing about the film, but instead of spending time on Twitter or Slack, let me just share my thoughts here.

What makes The Rise of Skywalker so bad? Well, there are multiple levels of badness involved.

[SPOILERS HEREON Y'ALL.]

First is the filmmaking itself. This was the most shocking thing about IX. I knew Abrams would go for nostalgia and servicing fandom. I figured he'd undermine VIII. I didn't know he would make such a straightforwardly bad movie, one alternately boring (the guy next to me on opening night fell asleep) and poorly told (my wife can't be the only one who found it difficult to follow).

The opening 30 minutes in particular move so fast, across so many worlds and plot points and characters old and new, with such flat-footed awkwardness, that it feels as if Abrams stepped in as director to replace another director who had already filmed all this. But that's not what happened. It's all him. Working for Disney, that trillion-dollar behemoth with all the money and time in the world to let Abrams make the best movie he possibly he could. And the result is shoddy beyond belief.

There are moments of elegance or grandeur. Rey's duel with Ren in his TIE fighter. The unexpected, graceful healing of the serpent beneath the sands. (Nice nod to The Mandalorian, that.) The ocean duel. The Sith coliseum of dead souls, the undead Emperor upheld by a black claw. Finn and Poe shooting up a Star Destroyer while running towards a low-angled tracking camera. The lightsaber "swap" from Rey to Ren (the one good and successful extension of a Rian Johnson idea). The shocking accidental death of Chewbacca at Rey's hands—

Whoops! I forgot, nobody dies in Star Wars.

And there's the rub. The problem is the script. It feels like it was written by committee in a succession of a dozen drafts. The result, at least until the final act, comes across like a series of videogame player quests. The doohickeys sought don't matter in themselves. They're just the next required token to level up and receive the next assignment.

The other problem with the script is its bottomless well of bad ideas. Hux is a spy! (Dead Hux. Dad Hux!) Leia retconned into a Jedi! Leia as Rey's true Jedi Master! A fleet of thousands of Star Destroyers, each as powerful as a Death Star—yet unable to move without being directed by a single frail antenna! (Dracula rules, as ever.)

Worst of all, Palpatine as Rey's grandfather and inexplicably alive after being thrown to his death by Vader in VI and the secret Blofeld-like master-puppeteer behind Snoke and the First Order. (Abrams: The first order? THE FINAL ORDER!) The opening words of the crawl read, "The dead speak!" A nice B-movie callback to the saga's origins. But also a foolish, self-parodying decision by a writer-director who quite literally has done nothing but make sequels and remakes for his entire career. The man does not know anything except what he watched as an adolescent. Sometimes he remixes it well. Here, he does not.

What Abrams needs is whatever happened to Lindelof while making The Leftovers. A kind of creative baptism, liberating him from his felt need to please fans by giving them what they think they want and instead steering into, rather than away from, the original and often deeply weird creative ideas that result.

What Abrams needs is an overseer—what is often known as an editor or producer—who watches his back and tells him when he's gone astray. It turns out Kathleen Kennedy is not that person. After half a decade care-taking the new, post-Lucas Disney period of Star Wars, she has given us a track record by which to judge her. It's not pretty.

For example: Instead of the now-canonical opening lines of the crawl, the obvious opening words should have been, "General Leia Organa has died." Next: "The galaxy gathers to mourn its departed royal leader. Following the Battle of Crait and the mysterious passing of the beloved princess, people flock to join the Resistance in a final push to defeat the evil First Order."

Is that so hard? Abrams thought to honor Carrie Fisher by using preexisting footage of her as Leia paired with digital work to map her face onto other actors in key moments. It doesn't work. It's clunky and forced and, wittingly or not, ends up putting more rather than less weight on her presence in the film.

What else? Poe continues to be little more than Captain Earnest. Finn almost reveals his heart to Rey—the film teases us with it—and then it's left dangling. (Was a scene of closure left on the cutting room floor? Is it meant to pop back up in the next trilogy, when Old Finn and Old Rey lose their only child to the Supremely Final Order's Supremely Supreme Leader, a clone of a clone of Palpatine's great-grandfather's uncle?) At least in part it's left dangling because Abrams decides to make Rey and Ren's final moment a kiss. I'm sure some other version of this film could have sold that, but Abrams certainly does not.

Now, Adam Driver and Daisy Ridley have long been the best things about this third trilogy. And they do excellent work again in their roles. Were it not for them, the movie would be borderline unwatchable. But after Rian Johnson did not so much in The Last Jedi to move their characters along, Abrams freezes them in place until, with a snap of the fingers, their character arcs lurch into their foreordained change/resolution—and off to the climax we go.

Note well: Abrams isn't only copying Lucas (again and again), he's copying himself. The big moment for Ren to turn from evil to good is prompted by nothing so much as an imaginary memory of the last conversation he shared with his father, Han Solo. So Abrams in effect recreates his own scene from VII on the bridge when Ren kills Han—only this time, for no apparent reason, he throws away his lightsaber, having argued himself into it.

Whereas Rey, gone angry and Sith-y because bloodline, turns back to good after a handy chat with Luke in Force Ghost form. And then we're off to the races.

Even writing it out is painful. It's just so, so bad. Not to mention Lando, featuring Billy Dee Williams playing Lando as Billy Dee Williams playing Lando. Or blink-and-you-miss-them new characters like Zorii or Jannah—full of potential, but too little too late. Oh, and Rose, who for no reason at all is relegated to Leia's babysitter. She could and should have been the Lando of this trilogy: introduced mid-chapter, then a fellow front-liner in the finale. Why not include her with the trio of Rey, Finn, and Poe on their (three dozen) mission quests? Just one more way to stick it to Rian Johnson, apparently.

And that's going to be the legacy of this film. Abrams' fundamental failure to understand what The Last Jedi accomplished, and what it made possible. Either Kathleen Kennedy agrees with Abrams in his estimation of that film, or she capitulated to fandom's purported desires (and thus lacks the insight or leadership to steer the ship). Either way, it's quite a thing to behold a billion-dollar franchise lack any semblance of vision across three films made in only a few years' time.

In sum, Episode IX had the opportunity to be something special. Even granting the hand Johnson was dealt (not least the foolish decision to destroy the New Republic, thus reducing the trilogy to a rehash of the original, at least at the formal level), he set up the finale to tell a new story: no Supreme Leader, no Emperor, no Death Star, no consolidated Rebels ready for a Final Mission Once And For All. In Johnson's hands—or Brad Bird's, or Christopher Nolan's, or Tony Gilroy's, or Sam Mendes's, or James Mangold's, or Kathryn Bigelow's, or whomever—it could have been great. It could have been different, new, bold, and unexpected. It could have taken us by surprise, not by resurrecting the ancient dead of the Original Trilogy, but by telling a new story in a new way about these new characters we'd come to care for.

But in Abrams' hands, no one's ever really gone, and there's only ever one story to tell, and re-tell, over and over until the end of time. A pity.





Random Further Comments (Dec 20)

–Is IX worse than the prequels? Not II, which is the worst movie ever made. But it might be worse than I and III. At the very least, it's a discussion. Moments here surpass moments there; but the filmmaking is less shoddy there than it is here. It's all a matter of taste, really. What sort of bad do you prefer your bad movie to be?

–I have long said that J.J. Abrams is the best caster in film. That's his destiny: a producer of blockbuster films who has veto power on all casting decisions. He may also be allowed to touch up dialogue. Otherwise he is not allowed anywhere near a script. He is not allowed to produce or direct films based on preexisting intellectual property. And he is only allowed to direct movies written by someone other than himself.

–After a promising start, Finn's character never got his due across the trilogy. A missed opportunity, in two respects: to explore the psychology of a turncoat stormtrooper, and to consider the moral ambiguity of fighting and killing an opposing military force largely made up of child soldiers (i.e., children kidnapped and brainwashed into service).

–Rey's self-made yellow lightsaber at the end was a nice touch. But as a friend pointed out, it should have been modeled on her long staff: either lengthier in form or double-bladed like Darth Maul's. UPDATE: Turns out I didn't look closely enough. The new lightsaber is made from her long staff, only reduced to a normal size blade handle, rather than fitted into a double-bladed one. Should have spotted it, and that's a solid choice from Abrams et al.




Further Comments Post-Second Viewing (Dec 21)

–I took my oldest to see the movie today, and I have to say, upon second viewing, it was a less frustrating experience. Note well: Not one of the movie's flaws turned out to be something other than a flaw. Everything above stands. But during my first viewing, I thought I would hate to return to the film, even that I might find it unwatchable. It's plenty watchable. And knowing all the terrible script decisions in advance means not audibly groaning at the revelation of each one. That's not nothing, I suppose.

–The second viewing also allowed me to see more of the artistry in the direction, which during the first viewing I found hard to distinguish from the problems in the script (not least since the latter affects the former in numerous ways, especially length of scenes and speed of cutting from one to another). Abrams really is a skilled director of action, emotion, and dialogue. That's what makes the failure of the film painful rather than ho-hum.

–The film was doomed before a single shot was filmed. And it's not micro-elements, it's the macro-frame, the narrative context created from the outset. The three principal mistakes are: Palpatine's return; Rey's lineage; and Leia's central role. All the other flaws (with the possible exception of demoting Rose to a glorified cameo) pale in comparison to those, and could have been incorporated into a quality film. No movie's perfect, after all. This one didn't have to be. It's the deep infrastructure of the story, not particular scenes, that ensure its downfall.

–I was more impressed by John Boyega's performance this time around (and Oscar Isaac's to an extent). Watch him when he's not talking, or just before and after he has dialogue. The reaction shots are priceless. He's never not in character. It only makes the stalling-out of his character arc that much more galling.

–The number of loose threads combined with the amount of yada-yada-ing of plot was glaring on the second viewing. Abrams literally has a character say, "Dark arts. Cloning. Sith jabberwocky..." or some such thing as a comprehensive response to Palpatine being alive. Did they not finish the script? Is there a scene lying on the cutting room floor that resolves Finn's unspoken declaration of love for Rey? Will we ever know?

–Abrams really has issues with killing characters off (also for blowing up entire planets: seven across three films, with two more nearly goners); you can tell by his affinity for fake-killing them and letting them live. M:I:3 opens with the apparent murder of Ethan Hunt's wife—nope. Star Trek Into Darkness ends with Kirk's fake death, brought back to life a few minutes later via Khan 2.0's blood (and also tribbles? It's all so hard to recall the finer points of his scripts). Poe fake-dies in VII, with no real explanation. And in this one both Chewie and Rey "die," only to be not-dead (having never died, in the one case, or been brought back to life, in the other) mere seconds later.

–Must Rey and Ren have kissed at the end? Really? Still not buying it, y'all. (Though that scene at the climax with his face filling the frame, staring "at" Rey, communicating silently, ready to receive the lightsaber: that's a killer. Again, there are solid moments, scenes, and ideas; but in the end it's not just parts that don't add up: the film, finally, is less than the sum of its parts.)

–Having said all that, in the same way that I can enjoy Episodes I or III with my kids, who love Darth Maul and pod-racing and clones and Mace Windu and CGI Yoda and the rest, I was able fully to enjoy IX with my son (his first Star Wars movie in the theater!), who gasped at Rey's family name and laughed at the droid humor and was delighted Ren turned good and found the Emperor truly frightening. (He even leaned over the moment after Rey and Ren kiss, and said, "That's the first time he's ever smiled!") So I'm glad there's that. I wrote above that IX might be worse than I or III. I realize now that's mostly not true. The Phantom Menace is more of an original story, and has genuinely interesting ideas—however poorly executed—and in that respect Lucas has the better of Abrams: the former creates, the latter remixes. But in most other ways IX is superior, also to III. It helps to have sterling actors in gripping roles directed skillfully in gorgeous locales amid haunting atmosphere. If only there were a story to fill it out.




Further Reflections One Week Out (Dec 26)

–Most of my reading, conversations, and encounters in the past week have been with folks who were similarly disappointed with IX, though not always for similar reasons. Even those who have enjoyed it have admitted the shortcomings, vices, or script problems. Less than half a dozen have been unqualified lovers of the film (though I've only found such persons online, not in person—and at least a few appear to have been contrarians who went in knowing the buzz was bad).

But three defenses of the film keep popping up, and they're worth addressing. First: that Palpatine's return was fitting. Second: that superior alternative plots are not forthcoming. Third: that IX is a proper conclusion to the Skywalker–Palpatine trilogy of trilogies as a whole.

Let me take these up together, since they're related to one another, before moving on to some other reflections.

To the second point first: I do think there are superior alternative plots, though the burden of proof need not fall on lowly critics like myself to supply them. Stories are contingent; a thousand things can happen. Fittingness is an art: one says of the fitting conclusion, "Yes, I see now, it could have ended no other way." Abrams wants us to believe that. He's wrong.

But, in any case, sometime in the next week my final(!) update to this ever-expanding post will be an alternative opening crawl and a basic plot line for the film, Palpatine- and lineage-free. (Spoiler: It opens with a royal funeral, and it involves sabotage efforts from without and from within the First Order, including spies.)

But back to the first point: What the defenders miss about the inconveniens of Palpatine's return is not his return full-stop. It is his return out of nowhere, with not a hint or foreshadowing in VII or VIII. It is unfitting because it is a villain deux ex machina—a diabolus ex machina?—wherein the Big Bad, for lack of a better option, is parachuted in to give the story false gravitas it has not otherwise earned and was not naturally heading toward. The truth is that Rian Johnson killed J. J. Abrams' New Big Bad, himself little more than Palpatine Redux, so Abrams did the next best thing: bring back the original. Again, we know this extra-textually, because Abrams made this particular decision upon returning to Star Wars to take over from Colin Treverrow, and neither Treverrow nor Johnson had any inkling of Palpatine's impending resurrection.

This brings us to the third point, that IX works as a sequel capping off the three cycles of Star Wars films. I think some clarity can be shed here by reframing the question one asks. To wit: The following are distinct questions that admit of different answers:

1. Is IX a fitting sequel to VIII?
2. Is IX a fitting conclusion to VII?
3. Is IX a fitting conclusion to IV–VI?
4. Is IX a fitting conclusion to I–III?

Defenders of IX are, so far as I can see, interpreting IX in the light of either The Force Awakens or the prequel trilogy (and thus question #2 or #4). Understood in that way, I can see why they might answer in the affirmative. If the nine-film saga is finally about both the Skywalker and the Palpatine bloodlines, or "houses," then in a way IX works, especially the final act. Moreover, IX works quite well as a kind of direct sequel to VII: the style, the humor, the storytelling, the recycling of tropes, characters, even lines of dialogue: if VII is your jam, you're bound to love IX.

Where IX does not work—at all—is as a sequel to The Last Jedi or as a conclusion to the original trilogy. Regarding the latter, it disentangles and disintegrates the beautiful commingling of the personal and the political, encapsulated perfectly in the final act of Return of the Jedi when the throne room scene functions as both an intra-family drama and a microcosmic battle upon which the fate of the entire galaxy hangs. And this is itself the culmination of a three-film discovery of this very entanglement: Luke is an orphan whose father was murdered long ago, only to learn the would-be murderer is his father, only to realize the princess he sought to help is his own sister. And to save his father he must be saved by him, thus destroying the Emperor, thus destroying the Empire: this is not merely to restore balance to the Force and to bring peace to the galaxy but to restore order and bring peace to his own family.

But IX undoes this: the New Republic is annihilated at the drop of a hat by a Death Star 3.0; the Empire is resurrected as the First Order; the Emperor is resurrected as ... himself. (All this has happened before, and all this will happen again.) But IX gives us no reason to think, with Rey's supposed victory, that days or weeks or months later later it's not all going to play out again, exactly as before. When Luke throws away his lightsaber and Vader throws the Emperor down the shaft, the elation and catharsis we originally felt and are meant still to feel at the simultaneous personal and political victory just accomplished has been reduced to the personal alone.

And as for VIII: The Rise of Skywalker is not just a failure of a sequel to The Last Jedi—at every level—it is a sort of anti-sequel. It actively, intentionally, and painfully seeks at every turn to undo the plot, themes, and character arcs of the previous film. And even if your judgment of VIII is that it is something less than superlative (a misguided judgment, but one I'll permit for now), surely you must admit that a direct sequel that so clearly hates its predecessor, laboring with all its might to unburden itself of its inheritance, is a recipe for narrative confusion, incoherence, and sloppiness. Fittingness is about beauty, harmony, and order. The only honest feeling one can have going from TLJ to TROS is whiplash. Whomever is to blame for that (Kathleen Kennedy above all, also Abrams, but not at all Johnson, who was given free reign and no heads up for what was to come), the result is a fracture within this final trilogy that weighs heavily on the ability of IX to perform its duty as triple finale: sequel/conclusion at once to Rey, to Luke and Leia, and to Anakin. It buckles and breaks under the weight—one chosen by the writer-director, not forced upon him.

–Another word about Abrams: the man loves his narrative cheats and work-arounds. His worst vice is impatience. Kirk must be promoted immediately. Rey must already be a brilliant pilot and swordsman. Finn can be a general just like that. Need a master code-breaker? Poe knows a gal. Need to get to Exogol to stop the super-duper-master-fleet-each-as-powerful-as-a-death-star within 16 hours, plus round up the entire galaxy to come help? Sure, why not.

Worse than this abbreviated storytelling tic, Abrams as often as not refuses put in the time or the effort to earn our affection or trust for his characters or plot beats. Rather, he works with borrowed emotional capital. He knows how we already feel about Han or Leia or Chewie or Luke, and he uses that to his advantage. He brings in a stray "memory" to turn the lead villain into a hero. He has the good guys and bad guys keep flying the same ships, in the same planet locales, wearing the same suits, with the same droids along for the ride: and this time, no one can die, not for good. Does he need to create a new character to rally the troops for a final battle? Nope. Billy Dee Williams will do the job nicely. Should Benedict Cumberbatch play a heretofore unknown adversary for Kirk, Spock, & co.? Nah: Khan 2.0 is what the people want. And you've got to give the people what they want.

–I continue to lament the unintelligible and finally uninteresting character arc for poor FN-2187. If VII, following his desertion, was about Finn's struggle with a kind of cowardice—running away from evil and danger—and VIII about wrestling with recklessness—now running straight into danger and certain death—then IX should have concerned the mean of those two extremes: what it means for this child-soldier turncoat to be courageous, to embody the virtue of bravery.

Instead, we get a replay of both VII and VIII with Finn being funny but Rey-obsessed while also attempting, again, a suicide mission (only this time not kept from following through with it by Rose). And though Abrams has said in interviews that the film was meant to reveal that Finn, too, is Force-sensitive, and that this is what he wanted to tell Rey, this is far from evident in the film, and the half-hearted attempt to address his affection for Rey is clumsy at best (not to mention, for the thousandth time, acting as if Rose, i.e. Abrams' stand-in for VIII/Johnson, doesn't exist). What a missed opportunity.

–If Finn stands for the virtue of courage, it seems to me that Poe stands for prudence: a virtue he learned in the previous film, but which he must re-learn for Abrams here, since what happens in TLJ stays in TLJ. But what if Poe were less earnest in this film, less impulsive and soul-searching and navel-gazing, and more of a straightforward, prudent, wise leader?

As for Rey: I want to say her virtue is justice, paired with religio. Rendering what is due to those to whom it is due in proper proportion, while honoring, with an appropriate piety, those to whom one is indebted—including, in her case, Rey's literal parents, but also and especially her adoptive family: the Resistance, on the one hand, and the Jedi, on the other. (Though I don't love "Rey Skywalker" at the end, I will allow it on this reading.)

–About Kylo Ren's turn. It was not necessary, much less inevitable, narratively, that he break good like his grandfather. Johnson posed this question in VIII: what if Ben Solo were offered the opportunity, considered it, but turned away (whether in weakness or in malice)? That is a story that could have been told well.

A story that involves his repentance from evil also could have been told well. That didn't happen here, not least because the turn is a cheat: saved from death, his own memory converts him. What's more, the film has him simply become Good at that point. But the brilliance of Vader's turn in VI isn't that he goes from Evil to Good at the drop of a hat. Rather, he lets his paternal love for his son overthrow his willingness to cooperate with evil—and only thus does he turn on Palpatine.

Adam Driver's performance overcomes Abrams' deficiencies as a writer here, but the intriguing possibility here was for a transformation that is only partial: so that Ren's conflicted badness—"Millennial Darth" playing dress-up but unable fully to embrace evil's true depths—becomes a conflicted goodness: love and devotion to Rey, perhaps, but not necessarily to her cause or her friends or the ends and virtues she stands and fights for. That is more dramatically interesting, truer to the character, and would have made for a fascinating open-ended "ending": Ben Solo, reconciled to Rey but not to himself or to what she loves. What does the future hold for such a pair? An unstable settlement, for sure, and one less happy-clappy kumbaya in the way that IX wants to repeat VI.

–Speaking of Ren and Rey, I'm increasingly dissatisfied by that kiss. I like the continued theme of attachment overcoming detachment, even as attachment presents the greater temptation for disordered loves and thus for fall into evil. Thus is Anakin lured to the Dark Side by Palpatine via his dysfunctional love for Padme; but thus also is Anakin redeemed by Luke's well-ordered detachment (willingness to die, lightsaber thrown away) rooted in proper attachment (love for his father and sister, unwillingness to kill in anger). This very balance of detachment within attachment is undone in Luke's fear (in the flashback of The Last Jedi) of what the young Ben Solo is capable of: and this unbalance tips Ben over to the Dark Side. What brings him back to the Light is Rey, who she is and what she does, and his, Ben's, overpowering love for her.

But is that love eros? It certainly isn't familial. It seems to me that, even at the level of the text of the films (VII and IX on their own, but also VIII), it isn't eros, either, but rather philia. The love of Rey for Ren and of Ren for Rey is one of friendship. That is itself one of the under-discussed themes of Star Wars, whereby the personal is wedded to the political not through family alone but through the power of friends to band together in the face of unimaginable power and terrible odds. (Perhaps the great failure of the prequel trilogy is its inability to depict friendship well, chiefly between Obi-Wan and Anakin. Not for lack of trying...)

But perhaps I'm not giving Abrams his due. On his terms, the eros of the new trilogy echoes and recapitulates the tragic eros of the prequel trilogy, with filial love anchoring the original trilogy and friendship uniting all three. I prefer my alternative, however, since it is isn't so much a failure of eros as one of philia that prompts Anakin's fall in Revenge of the Sith: his inability to be a friend to Obi-Wan, in truth and in justice. In which case, the redemption of Anakin's grandson by (ugh) Palpatine's granddaughter comes about by that very love whose lack doomed Anakin in the first place. Going forward, in fact, I think I will choose to read IX in this way, regardless of Abrams' intentions, since Ben and Rey's kiss can be interpreted as a kind of exuberant exclamation point in the Hamlet-esque final moments of their ostensible shared deathbed.

A silver lining, that, in an otherwise diverting but finally disappointing denouement to the Skywalker saga. If nothing else, Abrams always delivers by forcing his audience repeatedly to ask a single, lingering question of all of his films. That is, what might have been.

About that Episode IX trailer

Everything I wrote here stands, but man alive is that a beautiful trailer.

It's a reminder of what Abrams gets: emotion, character, rapport, scale, energy, world-building, and—as this trailer not-misleadingly reminds us—composition and cinematography.

What we will see here in just 8 weeks is whether he delivers on everything he has always failed to accomplish, at least in full, not least those crucial modifiers of popular storytelling: original (not derivative), creative (not nostalgic), and conveniens (not mystery-box surprising).

I'm not optimistic, but it's not hopeless just yet. No matter what, it will be an experience. The only question is whether he'll be able to stick the landing.

A few comments and predictions while we're at it.

1. I genuinely appreciate how much Abrams has withheld from us. I only wish he'd kept that shot of faux-dark Rey from us.

2. Rey will not "go dark." That brief glimpse is a Force vision (false or future), a clone, her under control, or her under cover. No other alternatives.

3. I appreciate that Abrams is giving us—at least suggesting he is giving us—some follow-up and resolution to the Finn–Rey relationship. Given their separation in VIII, it will be interesting to see how immediate and intimate the quality of their rapport is in IX.

4. The movie will be beautiful, epic, and capital-F Fun.

5. I've stayed away from spoilers (I know nothing but what's in the three trailers), but my guess is that Rey and Ren team up for some reason or purpose for at least part of the film, and that during that team-up Rey submits to being trained by Ren. One idea: they both realize the Emperor's plan and/or learn of some MacGuffin that is crucial to it and agree that it is better to join against him/it than lose divided. Perhaps either she or he deceives the other to induce the alliance; perhaps not.

6. I'm left wondering how Abrams will fit the preexisting footage of Leia into the narrative. If VII was Han's goodbye and VIII was Luke's, IX was going to be Leia's: first the father, then the uncle, then the mother. (Perhaps that is how Rey persuades Ren to join her? To follow her to the ruins of the second Death Star to discover what she sought there?)

7. A final prediction: The climactic scene of Rey before Palpatine will feature a sort of Jedi cloud of witnesses: Force ghosts from all the previous 8 movies combined, present and bearing witness to Rey and/or Ren's final showdown with the Great Sith Evil who has haunted all nine movies—the Skywalker Saga from start to finish. That means Qui-Gonn, (Mace?), Obi-Wan, Yoda, Anakin, (Han?), Luke, Leia: I bet we see all of them, and a few more. Perhaps them in front, and hosts upon hosts behind them. Take it to the bank, y'all.

8. A final final prediction: The make-or-break derivative-or-break-the-cycle question is whether Abrams will have Ren break good right at the end, exactly the way his father did. I'm more concerned with the story playing out beat for beat in imitation of VI than whether Abrams ret-cons Rey's identity or some such thing. I would say, "Surely he knows better," except he's the one who thought remaking IV with a new MOAR BIG Death Star was a great idea ... so who knows.

Just 56 days. Oh, and I'm bringing my oldest: his first Star Wars movie in the theater. Come on, J.J. old buddy, don't let me down: you're my only hope.

On Episode IX and J.J. Abrams

In 16 weeks, Episode IX—the conclusion to the final trilogy in the trilogy of trilogies that the Star Wars saga has become, not to mention the other stand-alone films and the new live-action TV show—will be released. The new teaser made available earlier this week generated a lot of discussion and speculation about plot lines and, above all, the direction the script will take and, ultimately, how it will wrap up the story.

Up till now I've tried to be realistic but hopeful about the possibility that J. J. Abrams might actually stick the landing, if not perfectly, than satisfactorily. What he did in VII was a combination of good and bad, but Rian Johnson took the hand he'd been dealt and did something masterful with it in VIII. Could Abrams have something equally excellent up his sleeve? Could he surprise us all by finally overcoming his worst tendencies and producing truly original, brilliant work?

The truth is that we have no reason to think so.

Consider the other films Abrams has written and/or directed in the last 15 years: Mission: Impossible III, Star Trek, Super 8, Star Trek Into Darkness, and The Force Awakens. The Rise of Skywalker is only the sixth film he has directed—and, if you begin in 1998 when he began to "be" J.J. Abrams (i.e., with the release of Armageddon and the premiere of Felicity), he's also only written six films.

Of those he has directed, only one was an original property, and only two, strictly speaking, were not a sequel. Three were expansions of TV shows. And as for each considered individually:

–M:I:3 is a polished 2-hour TV movie that is clearly a "first film."

–Star Trek is a retelling of the original Star Wars in Gene Roddenberry's universe, with an altered timeline and some yadda-yadda-ing of plot to get the Right Characters in the Right Place sooner rather than later.

–Super 8 is E.T. for millennials, with CGI.

–Star Trek Into Darkness is—as you know—a semi-remake of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. The less said about this one the better.

–And then there's Episode VII, which simultaneously re-launched Star Wars for a new generation and, in the structure of the whole film but especially in the final act, came close to being a beat-for-beat remake of Episode IV. A reboot that's also a sequel, somehow.

And now we come to Episode IX, which features the return of Lando Calrissian and, inexplicably, Emperor Palpatine. What could go wrong?

* * *

Now, I'm underselling Abrams' talents in the way I've presented his work. He has real strengths. He may be second only to Spielberg in his ability to cast, both knowns and unknowns. His direction of actors draws out the best of them. He can write and direct both dialogue and rapport with the best of them. And his films move: for all the flaws of the rest of the film, the opening 45 minutes of The Force Awakens is blockbuster filmmaking nonpareil. Oh, and his actual technique, in terms of frame and composition and color and so on, is underrated. Each of his films has improved substantially in that respect.

But Abrams' chief vice, his fatal shortcoming, undermines each and every one of these virtues: namely, his affinity for nostalgia, for telling and re-telling the stories he grew up with and whose essential beats, he knows, his audience yearns to see in only slightly dressed-up form.

Had he made only one or two different decisions in VII—say, having Starkiller Base fail in its attempt to destroy the New Republic, or having the Resistance's attempt to disable and destroy the Base fail, thus resulting in a lack of catharsis and non-replay of IV—things could have gone differently there, because it's clear that Abrams was trying to comment on his own, which is to say his generation's, inability to move beyond the past, to play dress-up in Boomer Glory even as a decadent empire falls apart. Kylo Ren is, in that respect, a perfect pop culture creation.

But he didn't have the courage or the imagination or the awareness or the studio support to go fully revisionary in his Star Wars entry, and thus here we are.

* * *

So: Might Episode IX be good?

In fact, that's not the right question, because it will without a doubt be good, because Abrams doesn't make bad movies. The problem, rather, is that he may only make Good Movies.

Rephrasing, then: Will Episode IX be more than good? Will Abrams upset our expectations beyond the mystery box and a couple "shocking" surprises?

The answer, unfortunately, is no. Every sign points to it. There will be funny rapport and lovely images and stirring character beats and some fantastic action. But Abrams won't be able to resist the siren song of nostalgia. The nods and winks to the prequels and original trilogy, the recycling of old themes and narrative devices and literal resurrected characters: they're all going to be there, in full, without apology. And that'll be the end of that. Best to accept it now rather than manufacture unfounded expectations for a writer-director who has been nothing if not consistent for two decades of TV and film work.

That'll be the end of the Skywalker saga, and if we're lucky, the end of Abrams' involvement with Star Wars, too—for good.

Audience age for Star Wars films

Over the last year or so I've re-watched nearly every Star Wars film. My sons (6 and nearly 5) have been making their slow initial journey through the Original Trilogy and into the prequels. (We're currently paused between Episodes II and III. The former is even worse than you remember.)

Reflecting on these repeat viewings in conjunction with the recent new entries and the conversation surrounding them (not to say controversy, though whether that term calls for scare quotes is an open question, given the heavy doses of bad faith and trolling involved)—anyway, upon reflection, I've noticed one way to slice up all ten films: by the implicit age of the film's target audience. Let me show you what I mean:

IV: All ages
V: Adults
VI: Children
I: All ages
II: Children
III: Adults
VII: All ages
RO: Adults
VIII: Adults
Solo: Adults

These designations are arguable, obviously. And audience age doesn't in itself correlate with quality (though I suppose that's arguable, too): Solo is middling affair, though aimed at adults, while both IV (all ages) and VI (children) are superior films.

But disaggregating the SW series in this manner is helpful in a few ways, I think.

First of all, it can clarify some of the arguments about which films are "best" (or one's "favorite"). Most kids who grew up with the OT on VHS or DVD have VI as their favorite, for example. Why? It's the only one exclusively aimed at them! They don't mind the silliness and character flatness and narrative problems that bother adults; they ignore such things, focusing on what's fun; and since there's a lot of fun to be had in VI, it's their favorite. (Kids also love series' conclusions, so there's that, too.) My boys also enjoyed II, which is a categorically awful film, and at least part of the explanation is that it, too, is aimed squarely at them.

Whereas many adults have plausible arguments about which they prefer most, IV vs. V and/or VII vs. VIII (or even opposing one of the latter group to the former). At least part of what that's about, in my view, is whether one is judging the film simply as a species of the genre film, or instead as a species of the sub-genre universal myth/hero's journey/space opera (or even the smaller sub-sub-genre, Star Wars film). Part of the appeal of the latter two sub-genres is precisely their catholic appeal, uniting people from a variety of backgrounds, ages, cultures, etc., in affection and appreciation of George Lucas's far-away galaxy, which sweeps along all who give themselves to it. But neither Empire nor Last Jedi has this sort of appeal, not (as the erroneous opinion has it) because they are inferior films, but rather because they lack the universality of the originals to which they are sequels. They are relatively stand-alone (ironic, given their in-the-middle status), subtly crafted works of visual art aimed at adults who appreciate the formal as well as the material aspects of the medium. Even if one's opinion of either V or VIII is lower than this high judgment, the thoughtfulness and craftsmanship behind both are undeniable. (They are together, by the way, the only films out of the 10 to feature a more than superficial relationship between a male and a female character, romantic or otherwise.)

The fact that VII is very nearly a remake of IV, by the way, also suggests why some people prefer it to VIII or any of the other new films, even when they grant its redundant qualities: catholicity in blockbuster fun covers over a multitude of sins.

(I should also add that there's a good argument to be made that Phantom Menace is a children's film, and I would have agreed until I re-watched it. Jake Lloyd and Jar Jar Binks certainly bend it that direction. But I was shocked by how well directed, how well acted—at least, that is, by McGregor and especially Neeson—and how thematically adult and not-stupid it was. Subtract child-Anakin, JJB, Midi-Chlorians, the casual racism, the stiff acting by others ... okay, that's a lot ... but still, the themes of decadence, self-mastery, obedience, elite insouciance—plus the surprisingly lovely compositions by Lucas—and it could have added up to something good. All of which is to say, Lucas was aiming for all ages, old and young alike. He failed, but his failure was laudable in a way that Attack of the Clones manifestly was not.)

Finally, the fact that all four of the recent SW films have been aimed at either all ages or adults helps to explain why none of them has been panned critically or bombed commercially (reports of the contrary being false in both cases). No one hated Solo, though it was simply fine, and Last Jedi was an enormous success with critics and audiences, even if a small segment of fans didn't care for it. Now why is that? One possibility is that none of the four is a kids movie. This reminds me of Ta-Nehisi Coates' remark, after VII was released, in response to Ross Douthat's confusion about the film's positive reception: that The Force Awakens was, at long last, an actual, bona fide movie, unlike the prequels. Expanding that point, I think people, critics included, appreciate going to a SW film and not being treated like children; not being condescended to cinematically, that is. (No Ewoks—yet!) Even when the results aren't A-level (as with VII's plot replays, Rogue One's script issues, and Solo's shrug-inducing, unimaginative checklist of greatest hits), they're not meant for 7-year olds. Movies made for adults can be mediocre, or just good, or controversial. But they're still for adults, or at least for adults and kids.

So my theory goes, at least. Let's just hope J. J. Abrams keeps it in mind for Episode IX.

Notes on The Last Jedi, Godless, and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

Though not in that order, because spoilers.



Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

–I did not like this film. I admired its craftsmanship, not least the acting, the unwieldy plot, the attempted control at something like permanent tonal dissonance (which is, I suppose, a backhanded way of saying I thought the tone was out of control), the thematic complex animating the film's every turn. I generally admire and enjoy the work of both the writer-director Martin McDonagh and his brother. But not this one.

–Eve Tushnet captures a great deal of what's wrong with the film here. These two paragraphs sum it up:

Or take the reason for Mildred Hayes’s furious grief. She feels guilty about her daughter’s horrifying death–of course she does, that’s how anyone would feel. But the film doesn’t trust us to accept that anybody would feel that way. The movie has her feel guilty because she literally, exactly in these words told her daughter to go walk in that field and get raped and murdered, and then she did!!!!!, and it’s just all so on-the-nose and unnecessary. It’s chintzy.

The huge, sad and sordid problem with the movie is that racism and black people are ciphers in an alphabet used to talk solely about the sins and redemptions of white people. Racism is a theme the movie insists on grappling with but it just cannot do it well, because the black characters aren’t people. They are plot furniture who might as well blink out of existence as soon as they’ve performed their role in the moral drama of the white folk.

The film simply does not trust its audience, nor does it trust the would-be ordinary griefs and grievances the film is ostensibly about. Everything is turned up to eleven: Mildred doesn't just set up outlandish billboards, she throws Molotov cocktails at the police station; the dumb racist violent cop isn't just dumb and racist and violent, he marches into an office building, walks up to the second floor, beats up a man, and throws him out of a window (all filmed in one take, thus doubling down on the scene's histrionics with fussy cinematic virtuosity); and so on.

–Tushnet also touches on the wild tonal swings that, while perhaps not doomed to failure, certainly fail here. One moment Mildred's talking to her ex-husband, busting balls; the next he's throwing the kitchen table against the wall and grabbing her by the throat, their son holding a knife to his own father's throat—only for the ex-husband's dim-witted half-his-age girlfriend to walk in the doorway and drain the tension because she has to pee. It's as if a Judd Apatow comedy interrupted a Scorsese film.

–The first act is mostly good, but everything falls to pieces the moment Woody Harrelson's cancer-stricken sheriff kills himself. Not only are his final words to his wife (in his suicide note) execrably romanticized, but all of a sudden the jolly, ever-recognizable voice of Beloved Actor Woody Harrelson becomes the Ghost of Christmas Future for the characters left behind. Mildred and said dumb racist violent cop receive posthumous letters from the sheriff-turned-seer, poring into their souls and speaking, as only Beloved Actor Woody Harrelson's voice could, their future best selves into being, guiding them from beyond the grave. Having lovingly, generously, self-sacrificially "saved" his wife and daughters untold grief at "having to watch him" suffer and die, and thus be "left" with "that lasting image" of him—instead of the "one final perfect day" they do have—he now transforms himself into a truly selfless saint. Light a votive candle while you're at it, Mildred.



Godless

–Scott Frank is one of the best living writers in Hollywood, and anything that gives him work is cause for celebration. Doubly so when it's a long-gestating limited series Western for Netflix.

–In an interview on Fresh Air, Frank said he didn't want to avoid the classic tropes of the great Westerns; he wanted to include every single one, and then some. Amen. As with all genre, the way to go is either radically revisionary (a la Tarantino) or pure specimen with a twist. Anything in between usually falters; and more to the point, you have to show you can master (or have mastered) the genre's necessary features in order to succeed at all, and few directors are so accomplished as to be able to go the Tarantino route. Frank chose wisely.

–The series centers on a town of women, widows who one and all lost their husbands in a single tragic mining accident. A stranger comes to town, adopted son and deserter of a viciously violent leader of a criminal gang. As the vengeful Bad seeks vengeance, we learn about the stranger, the woman who took him in, the town's inhabitants, and its supposedly cowardly sheriff.

–The series is gorgeously shot, lush with all the Western geography you could ask for, and shots of men riding horses with such skill and beauty you convince yourself God made one for the other, and both to be captured in moving pictures. The actors are uniformly superb, particularly Michelle Dockery (of Downton Abbey fame), Scoot McNairy (from Halt and Catch Fire, among other things), and Jeff Daniels (simply reveling in a truly wicked part without ever crossing the line into Hamville). Frank takes his time with the characters and with the moments that make them who they are, or who they become. The details and the dialogue are lived-in and witty without ever calling attention to themselves.

–Two problems keep the series from making good on its promise. The first is pacing: stretched across seven episodes of varying length, one can easily imagine the two and a half hour movie version of this story. At least two episodes (five and six) are pure filler, and other side plots could be scratched without loss. Such a problem is permissible if everything else works. Unfortunately...

–The finale simply does not deliver. The climactic shootout does deliver, as a piece of sheer filmmaking. But as climax to the narrative, it's a flop. Minus two minor characters who meet their doom quickly and without fanfare (one halfway through the series), no major character loses his or her life. Perhaps acceptable, if not for a serious issue at the script level: namely, the slaughter of Blackdom. You see, outside La Belle (the town of all women) there is an all-black settlement, founded by buffalo soldiers and their families. In the series finale, these characters—mostly a detour from the main plot lines—confer with one another about whether or not to help the all-white town. This is the first the camera has visited these characters without a white character standing in for the audience. Only moments later, however, Jeff Daniels comes a-knocking, and three minutes later every man, woman, and child in Blackdom is dead.

If Frank had committed to this kind of atrocity culminating his story—just one more feature of the impartial, unconquerable godlessness of the Western frontier—this decision could have been justified. Instead, more or less every white character gets to live on, kept safe (by Frank or by God?) from the hateful, meaningless death and destruction meted out just one town over. It is a profound misstep that undoes whatever good will the series has built up to this point, and undermines whatever Frank was hoping to say. Happy endings for the (white) leads, an unmarked grave for the rest.



The Last Jedi

–I am fascinated by what appears to be a wide divide in reactions to Rian Johnson's film. A number of critics as well as SW fans downright love it, hailing it as one of the best SW films ever, rivaling the 1977 original and Empire in quality, depth, and craft. Those who disagree aren't merely in the middle, however; they actively dislike the movie and think it largely fails. What's going on here?

–First, my own take: I think TLJ is a rousing success, marred only by a minor side plot (the trip to Canto Bight), which ends with a silly CGI scene and makes the pacing of the film's second act sag unnecessarily. A few other nits to pick, sure, but otherwise, the film is great. Everything with Rey, Kylo Ren, and Luke is A+. (Agreeing, as more than one person has, then commenting that everything else is a problem is a bit like saying Lord of the Rings is a failure except for all the scenes with Gandalf, Aragorn, and Frodo. Because, um, aren't they in most of them?) And there are at least three moments that took my breath away: the throne room, the lightspeed kamikaze, and the showdown between Luke and Ren. More on the good anon.

–Here's my take on the divide I'm seeing so far. Those praising the film up and down and those disappointed by it appear to be talking about different things. That is, nobody's arguing opposing sides of the same topic; it's all about what one was looking for, what one was struck by, and thus what one holds up for emphasis, as emblematic of the film's quality. Those who love TLJ are talking about Rey, Ren, and Luke; about Johnson's direction; about composition and color; about the film's core themes; about the departures from previous SW entries; about off-loading detritus from Abrams; about upending (even taunting) fanboys' expectations; about where the film leaves the story and its characters. Those left dissatisfied by TLJ aren't talking about any of that. They're talking about the silliness of Canto Bight; about the narrative dead-end of DJ and the covert mission of Finn and Rose; about the odd fit of Laura Dern's character and the half-baked nature of Poe's mutiny; about Leia's Force moment in space; about the premature deaths of Snoke and Phasma; about the further echoes and rhyming repetitions of past SW films; about Luke never leaving his Jedi island of loneliness, never unleashing some serious Force destruction on the First Order.

Note well: The lovers' love has a great deal to do with formal qualities and decisions, combined with the main characters' arcs. The haters' hate concerns specific matters of content, especially plot, especially relative to The Force Awakens. So I suppose this rift is going to continue. The haters aren't going to come around (they already grant the goodness of the Rey-Ren-Luke stuff), and the lovers just aren't worried about some of those plot matters, or think focusing on them is disproportionate to what the film does well.

–Another way to look at it: I think TLJ is a three-star film with two or three bona fide four-star moments and one or two two-star moments, whereas TFA is a three-star film that basically never rises above or sinks below that quality (minus the overall fact that Starkiller Base is an indefensible redux of IV and VI). And it's true that TLJ never quite has an extended sequence like the first act of TFA, which not only never stops moving, but may be the most well-paced, flawless 45 minutes in all nine SW movies. And there's no through-line like Harrison Ford's farewell Han Solo performance or Ridley and Boyega's banter (though the connection between Ridley and Driver in TLJ runs deeper, and is more interesting).

All that to say: I can understand having a preference for TFA over TLJ (leaving aside the original trilogy!); but that's simply comparing different movies with different agendas, different sensibilities, different stories, and different goals.

–So why am I, a TLJ defender, unconcerned about the haters' criticisms? Here's a preliminary response. The running of the CGI alien-bulls on Canto Bight is prequel-worthy nonsense, even cringe-worthy. Granted. But the trip itself is an interesting idea on a number of fronts, so the mere presence of a dumb 5-minute chase scene doesn't torpedo a 150-minute movie. First, the initial reason to go to the planet is to find a way to disable the First Order's ability to track the Resistance's fleet. Second, it provides something the SW series rarely offers: a fleeting glimpse into how the various machinations of the super-spaceships and military maneuvers and Jedi duels actually relate to ordinary planets and their inhabitants—or rather, how ordinary places and people perceive and are affected by this apparently unending galactic civil war. That's a narrative idea worth chasing. Third, the fact that the casino trip fails to result in what Finn, Rose, and Poe dream up for it does not make the whole thing a waste of time; that failure is one in a whole string of failures that mark the film from start to finish. Johnson has constructed TLJ as a kind of Dunkirk in Space: even star wars are less about heroism and triumph than sheer survival, against all odds. Live to fight another day, because maybe that day will be the day you don't get smashed to pieces by the bad guys.

So while Johnson should have rewritten what happens on Canto Bight—make it a heist, make it sleek and fun, make it devoid of all CGI—the trip itself, before and after, is perfectly warranted, and integral to the film's plot and themes.

–Otherwise, I'm basically unperturbed by TLJ's other flaws, real or perceived. Committing to Luke's near despair and total withdrawal (from the war, from those he loves, from responsibility, from the Force) is a brave narrative choice, and it succeeds. The same goes for leaving ambiguous just what happened between Luke and Ren that night when Ren tore down the temple. Relegating Maz to a cameo, making Hux a pitiable joke, and killing off Phasma is altogether shrewd storytelling revisionism, extended canonical universe and fanboys' imaginations be damned. The centerpiece of the film—the throne room scene—is pitch perfect, and killing Snoke before we learned anything about him is the point. He was just another Palpatine (and did we, in 1983, know anything about him, either?), and in shocking the audience through both killing him before IX and uniting Ren and Rey in battle, however briefly, Johnson unwrote Abrams's overweening nostalgia and freed him to finally tell a genuinely new story in the conclusion to this third trilogy. Whatever we might have "learned" about Snoke—whatever time we spent with him—would have been underwhelming and, ultimately, boring; leaving the First Order in (now) Supreme Leader Kylo Ren's hands is brilliant, bold, and wide open, narratively speaking. So much so that I can't believe Kathleen Kennedy let Johnson get away with it.

The rest is noise. And it's in Abrams's hands now, anyway. That's either very good news or very concerning. We'll see in 2019. Until then.

Coda:

 –One thing this experience, and the rift in TLJ's reception, has taught me is how difficult it is to assess a film this highly anticipated and this culturally significant based on a single viewing. I often have trouble with this: the first time I saw—to limit myself to big serial blockbusters—Skyfall, The Force Awakens, Rogue One, The Dark Knight Rises, and others, all I could register was the problems, real or imagined, with each film's script. It was only on a second or third viewing that I was actually capable of taking the film in, as a film. I'm already eager to go back and have this experience with TLJ.

–I see that there are some who feel like TLJ is basically a combination of Empire and ROTJ. I suppose this is true in a way; but I wonder how such folks feel about TFA, which at times is like a note-for-note remake of IV. In a sense, Johnson played the hand that was dealt him: if what Abrams wanted was to retell the original trilogy with new characters, Johnson sped up the process, so at least IX could be freed from all such expectations. I also happen to think TLJ is neither redundant nor predictable, but your mileage may vary.

–As for whether or not TLJ lets themes and messaging overtake the priority of story—so that, e.g., the film's gender politics become flashing neon lights instead of plot-integrated subtext—I'll just say that (first-time viewing syndrome again) I didn't even catch on to the fact that so many scenes played out between an individual man and woman, the former stubborn with pride, the latter drawing (or arguing, or fighting) said man into the good, the right, the undespairing future. I'll have to see how it plays in the second viewing. But precisely because I didn't see those flashing lights the first time, and since I don't recall a moment when the movie turns preachy, I doubt I'm going to think this is a problem, either.