Opinion Piece - The Star Wars Problem

Star Wars was a mistake. I don't just mean this in a hyperbolic "the human race was a mistake" kind of thing (though partly I do), I also mean that the original Star Wars was genuinely an accident. It is very common knowledge by this point that there was a lot of chaos on the set, in which a still novice director named George Lucas tried to make his sci-fi riff on old Kurosawa films with a Flash Gordon vibe. On getting to the edit room, editor Marcia Lucas found something of a mess. There were strange shifts between scenes, it was unclear what the tone was meant to be and everything felt incredibly amateur. Even today, you can go back and look at some of the original footage and it looks pretty terrible.

That original trilogy salvaged something mediocre and turned it into a phenomenon.

But then something incredible happened. In post-production, this hot mess of a product came together. Marcia Lucas gave scenes a flow that previously didn't exist and added the now iconic wipes as scene transitions. Industrial Light and Magic worked on special effects for the film and gave the space battles and lightsabers a genuinely tactile quality. Most importantly, John Williams came in and created a musical score that has since become one of the most iconic works of music ever recorded. Combining these three things with the promising base of footage, release it in the same way that launched Jaws to blockbuster success two years prior and suddenly, a phenomen is born. Star Wars (or A New Hope, or Episode IV, depending on which decade you were born) was a smash hit, spawning toys, books and two sequels, one of which is often hailed as the blueprint for a perfect sequel. That original trilogy salvaged something mediocre and turned it into a phenomenon in an incredible way and while I don't adore these three films like most people do, I have never had a bad time watching any of them. Unfortunately, that is the end of the happy bit of this story and where my hot takes are going to begin to flow.

The "Star Wars Problem", as I'm going to refer to it throughout, is that no one knows what to do with it. Incidentally, this isn't a totally original idea. If you've ever seen a Red Letter Media video on Star Wars, you'll understand the kind of attitude I hold with this franchise. George Lucas didn't know what to do with the first film when he made it, but a talented post-production team created gold and director Irvin Kershner managed to make lightning strike twice with The Empire Strikes Back. As soon as Return of the Jedi though, you start to see what I mean, as cracks begin to show. Once that first act is done, Han is free and Jabba is dead, Luke is the only character who still has an arc. All the other characters are relegated to playing with cuddly bears and re-enacting their favourite moments from A New Hope. I still think Return of the Jedi is a fun and entertaining little film, but it's clear that the magic of the first two films is already fading.

The cinematic travesty that is the Star Wars Holiday Special was created, truly one of the worst Christmas films you could ever dream of experiencing.

And fade it certainly continues to do, because it seems like George Lucas had no idea what to do with his newly created franchise. Between episodes four and five, the cinematic travesty that is the Star Wars Holiday Special was created, truly one of the worst Christmas films you could ever dream of experiencing. Lucas also kept tinkering at his original films, creating new editions of them that added certain features or special effects. One of the more notable and noticeable examples is the song in Jabba's palace, which seems to add nothing to Return of the Jedi apart from three extra minutes of running time. At this time, books and comics and video games were being created, but I'm not familiar with any of them and it seems like the consensus is that the further away from Lucas they get, the more interesting they are. We'll steer clear of them for those reasons, I'm sure many are great.

At the turn of millenium then, the prequel trilogy emerges, starting with The Phantom Menace. It has become in vogue recently to claim that the prequel films actually aren't that bad but no, they seriously are terrible. There's some fun meme content in there but the spirit of the original films that everyone loved are gone. Instead, we are faced with an annoying teen who will eventually become the most feared man in the galaxy, terrible looking CGI characters and bloated sections of political discourse that children won't understand and adults will wish they couldn't understand. Like I said, it's not an unredeemable trilogy, especially considering the fun that actors Ewan McGregor and Ian McDiarmid manage to have throughout the bunch, but it feels totally unable to justify three films that total almost eight hours of your life. After their release, it felt like the tide started to turn against Star Wars and that frankly, there didn't seem to be any reason that George Lucas should hold on to these films.

When I finally found myself in the cinema on opening day, I was giddy. At the time, The Force Awakens was all I hoped for.

So he didn't. Disney came along and bought the franchise for four billion dollars in a monumental deal, which opens up the next level of problems. They announced a slew of films, split between main series episodes and spin-offs, with a new film releasing every year. I think this is the first mistake. Before then, the smallest amount of time between Star Wars films was three years and suddenly we were being overfed. Fatigue seemed likely, a prediction that came true. To give these films some fairness though, I remember being so excited for The Force Awakens. I had grown up on Lego Star Wars and had an affection for all the films in me. Those trailers dropped slowly and built hype for over a year and when I finally found myself in the cinema on opening day, I was giddy. At the time, The Force Awakens was all I hoped for, a familiar Star Wars feeling that promised an exciting new story to come. That didn't quite transpire though.

Two years later, The Last Jedi released and was incredibly controversial. As the memes ever since have informed us all, it "subverted our expectations" and took the franchise in an unexpected direction, especially with Rey's lineage. Personally, I was very tired when I saw the film and it never properly sank in for me, but I know many people were furious and it became a source of internet vitriol for years. Disney didn't seem to have a plan for this new trilogy and had given director Rian Johnson free reign with the story, which must have seemed a boost for auteur filmmaking at the time but in retrospect feels like a failure in episodic storytelling. With no idea where to take the story after, The Rise of Skywalker happened, which attempted to rectify every mildly controversial and daring element of The Last Jedi. Even if you don't like The Last Jedi, it's tough to argue that what happened wasn't an embarrassing attempt to write an entire film out of existence with more fan service than any sane human could want. I remember leaving Rise of Skywalker and, contrary to the childlike glee I felt after Force Awakens, I felt like I never wanted to see another Star Wars film again.

Between these main episodes, we also got two spin-offs, which I would argue were both cinematic failures. Rogue One was an attempt to do an actual war film in the Star Wars universe but it can never properly find its tone or establish its characters. By the time emotional deaths and epic battles are happening, I felt so numb that the film totally washed over me and already knowing what the outcome of the mission was (will the rebels find out about this flaw in the Death Star?), I had no investment. Throughout, I couldn't help but think that if you wanted to watch a war film, couldn't you just watch a real war film, instead of this embarrassing facsimile of one with the paint of your favourite corporate product on it? The fan service elements here were particularly bad too, with a dodgy CGI recreation of a young Carrie Fisher and a cool if totally pointless fight scene with Darth Vader, whose only place in the film seemed to be to remind you it was Star Wars.

Knowing the genuinely embarrassing way that Han Solo gets his surname doesn't make me like the character more. In fact, it makes me like the character much less. 

If you want to talk bad fan service though, let's talk Solo. This is the origin of Han Solo, one of the most beloved characters in all of cinema, an explanation of how he became who he was. How he got his gun, how he met Chewie, even how he got his name. These are details that I certainly didn't care about, with Han being a perfectly formed character pretty much instantly, whose mystery only enhances his appeal. Knowing the genuinely embarrassing way that he gets his surname doesn't make me like the character more. In fact, it makes me like the character much less. The film was a total mess early on, with comedy directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller (the directors behind The Lego Movie and the modern update of the Jump Street franchise) being fired for trying to add too much of their own flair to the film. They were replaced by Ron Howard, a fine director but one who has absolutely no problem being a director for hire on projects like this. What you end up with is a totally soulless film that never transcends the feeling of being a product made to sell more toys and make more money for corporate juggernaut Disney.

With its films now on pause after lower than expected box-office returns, the question I want to ask is: what do we do with Star Wars now? I know The Mandalorian is proving very popular at the moment and again, I haven't seen the whole show so I don't want to talk about it at length. However, the few episodes I've seen seem enjoyable and in keeping with that original Star Wars spirit. Most of all, I enjoyed how it didn't seem to be desperately trying to tie itself to characters or locations we already knew, instead telling a new story. I've heard that the newest season is throwing that away and instead trying to tie its story back into the world of the main films, which only persuades me not to check the rest of the show out.

For me, this is the heart of what Star Wars should do now. It should tell new stories. Not every story in this universe should come back to a Solo or Skywalker or Palpatine. Not every desert planet needs to be Tatooine, not every forest planet Endor. There is literally a whole universe of undiscovered characters and worlds out there that Disney are not seizing on. Instead, they're returning to easily marketable characters and hoping for high profit at low risk. It's the kind of capitalistic nightmare that turns Star Wars from a film into a product and retroactively ruins all of the films for me, whether they're ones I liked or just ones that were fun to meme.

I want to enjoy Star Wars again.

I am sick of Star Wars at this point. It dominates cultural conversation despite having maybe a 50% ratio (if you're feeling charitable) of good content to bad content. I want other, more interesting explorations of science fiction to take the stage. I want also to enjoy Star Wars again. In the space of five years, Disney turned my enthusiasm for Star Wars into misery and a sense of reluctancy, a feeling that I only needed to see Rise of Skywalker to be in the conversation, not because it would actually be a film of worth. If Star Wars hibernates now, takes a few years, maybe a decade out of the limelight, and thinks about what it's done. that feels like a start. Go away and don't come back until you have new ideas that don't just feed off nostalgia for good things that someone else made. Star Wars should feel special and now it feels like a chore. That, at its core, is the Star Wars problem.