About "The Last Jedi" and "Solo": A Star Wars Article

Before we go any further I am going to start this article off with the following statements (and yes, there will be spoilers for both films of sorts):

1. I enjoyed and liked Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi
2. I enjoyed and liked Solo: A Star Wars Story

If either of the two above statements seem to cause you physical pain or elicit a visceral reaction akin to being sucker punched in the pineal gland, then buckle up partner because this is about to get wild.  And if you are someone who did not like either film for reasons that are among those not listed on /r/theredpill or were not part of the reason why Kelly Marie Tran just closed down her Instagram presence then I can assume we are good.  I could probably start a list with all of the things that people have had issues with and put down my counter argument, such as how bombs fall in zero gravity, how light speed works in relation to ships directly in the path of said ship going to light speed, or why Luke Skywalker apparently pussied out and hermitted himself on an island and died in the lamest bitch-ass way possible, which in turn destroyed everyones view of what Luke Skywalker meant to the universe.  For more about my thoughts on The Last Jedi, I will direct you to the article I wrote last December after the movie was released.

And because I was purposefully vague in December's article, I will clarify a bit on what I meant about certain characters not being handled well.  That character was Captain Phasma.  Considering how her last scene in The Force Awakens was left to a call back joke to A New Hope, I half expected her return here to mean something more than sauntering in, ordering an execution, reusing the "traitor" line, and falling into a pit of fire.  Granted I have not read Phasma, which may cover some of that story, but ultimately, I thought that the character and her second death(?) could have been written a bit better.  But, that did not ruin the rest of the movie for me.

In regards to the two big events that apparently really riled up some people (I do not know if it was a lot, most, or quite a few, so let us stick with "some") was the death of Luke Skywalker, and the discovery that Rey's parents were not anyone of note; These are going to be handled very quickly for the sake of my own sanity.

Luke Skywalker's Death:  Based on what little information was given in The Force Awakens, I felt that Luke's reason for going into exile after being betrayed by Kylo Ren was left up in the air.  I never felt that he was off buffering up Jedi energies in order to open up a devastating can of whoop-ass on Kylo and the First Order.  How it was explained in TLJ, made perfect sense to me.  We also do not know all about the time that Luke spent on the island.  Maybe he did go back to muster energies and ended up coming to the conclusion he did by the end of TLJ.  Was I sad to see Luke die?  Sure, but I do not feel that his death demeaned the legacy of the character at all.

Rey's Parentage:  I personally never subscribed to the wants of a lot of people that wanted her parents to be either Luke, Han & Leia (being Kylo's sister), or even Obi Wan's child.  I never liked the idea that since A New Hope, only members of the Skywalker family were able to use the force, and since Rey was force sensitive, that the only explanation was that she was a part of Anakin Skywalker's bloodline.  A lot of this desire for her not to be a part of an existing family stemmed back to a number of people calling for a Pirates of the Caribbean sequel where Will Turner's father to be Jack Sparrow, or that he would be reunited with his in-movie claimed father, Bootstrap Bill Turner; even on the writers commentary they said something along the lines of, "No, he's dead and crushed at the bottom of the ocean once the curse was reversed"; I feel like I have talked about this before.  I was also not excited that R+L did in fact =J, despite all of the hints that I managed to miss that were thrown about during the first five books.  I just really liked the idea that Rey didn't have "royal" parentage, and I still feel fits in perfectly with the subtext of the film that small people can cause great change.

Moving onto Solo: A Star Wars Story and what I have decided to call "The Waterworld Effect."  If you were alive in 1995 and of cognisant mind to recall the build up to the film Waterworld, you will recall all of the bad press that the film received even before it came out.  There were network TV news stories (on either KCRA, KOVR, or something) that reported the atrocity that was the ever ballooning $200,000,000+ budget that included the sinking of an entire set, and apparent blowouts between Kevin Costner and director Kevin Reynolds; I am sure there were others, but those were the two that always come to mind.  Then the summer of 1995 hit, Waterworld was released and I was one who saw it twice in one week.  I thought it was a great movie with an amazing soundtrack.  That was when commercials started airing applauding how much fun a movie Waterwold was, how it was the biggest blockbuster of the summer, and that it was the movie "to see" for the entire summer.  But it was too little too late.  Months of bad press led to a lot of people lauding the movie and it suffered at the box office.  This may not have been all the fault of the press it received, but that was how 15 year old me interpreted it and still do to this day.

This is very similar to what I saw happen with Solo.  There was a lot of talk about Alden Ehrenreich requiring an acting coach.  There was the talk about the first two directors leaving the film after having shot something like 50%+ of the movie.  There was talk about the fact that until There was talk about how John Williams was not going to return to do the score which was suicide for a Star Wars movie; never mind the fact that Michael Giacchino wrote the music for Rogue One.  And on top of all of that, there was the talk about certain segments of the Star Wars fanbase who called to boycott Solo because of how much they disliked elements in TLJ and because they didn't like anything that was not in the original trilogy; that last one may be a bit of a stretch.

I can understand some sentiment with not wanting to continue to watch a series if were unhappy with a film in a series.  I was unhappy with what Joel Shumacher did with Batman Forever and have never seen Batman & Robin.  After X-Men: The Last Stand, my interest in the series plummeted and I had not seen an X-Men movie in the theatres until last year when I saw Logan with Dr. Potts.  I understand that movies can put a bad taste in your mouth, but the amount of vitriol that was apparently created by a very vocal portion of the population who were unhappy with The Last Jedi, combined with a lot of the bad press that Solo received leading up to the film is something that I have not heard a lot of places talk about in regards to Solo's performance at the box office.  

And I do genuinely think that there is a bit of Star Wars burnout.  With the original trilogy, there were three years between each film.  For the prequels, it was still every three years for a new Star Wars film.  Now we have a main film every other year along with a separate story to fill in the gap.  And TLJ was released less than six months before Solo.  That is a very short time, and coming off all of the toxic hate that is still brewing from The Last Jedi probably did not lend any favors to a film in the same universe and being developed and released by the same studio.

(Very much not) in short, if you did not like The Last Jedi or Solo, I do not have a problem with you.  Just do not tell me how two movies that I very much enjoyed should have ended/altered/been completely different because they were full of SJW nonsense that have no place in a Star Wars movie.  We can part ways here and forever.



~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian
Everybody Just Sighs


P.S. This article was conceived and written after reading two comment threads on two separate Instagram posts from the official Star Wars account.  People tell you not to read online comments, and at times they are not wrong.