Hot take: everyone has been taking Star Wars way way way way way more seriously than they should have been since about 1993 at least, if not earlier, and everyone should shut up about it for a few years.
The original trilogy is fine. It’s a trio of entertaining movies about space muppets and robots and such. The problem is that they have since then somehow been built up into MYTHOLOGY OF OUR TIMES!!!, and everything since then has had to struggle under the weight of living up to, building upon, improving upon, radically reinventing and satisfying the requirements of MYTHOLOGY!!!, as if these movies about space muppets and robots and laser swords and such were somehow passed down to us straight from fucking Olympus on slabs of pure marble or some bullshit. These new movies were always going to fall off the tightrope of “we want these movies to do something radically new and exciting and different with this universe while at the same time giving us everything we find familiar and feel comforted by!”
And while the hardcore zealots are fucking obnoxious about it, they’re not the only ones to blame for this mess. There’s an entire cultural-industrial complex dedicated to milking every last drop of profit, every last click, every last atom of energy out of these goddamn movies, from cheap toys to neo-Marxist critical analysis. Everyone’s benefited from these space muppet robot movies becoming MYTHOLOGY!!!, but everyone wants something different from it, and no one’s going to get everything they want, so everyone’s going to be mildly resentful about it on some level. The whole exercise is a multi-billion dollar waste of everyone’s lives, and frankly, I’d be thrilled if I never saw the words Star and Wars together at this point.
So yes, of course I’ll be seeing this in the cinema. But I’ll be really sullen about it, you mark my words.
It's a good thing I wasn't drinking anything when I read that.
