Two days ago I watched “Rogue One: A Star War Story”. The film was moving, spectacular well made, and directed at an modern audience and relevant to the military-politic situation of our world today.
It is the last part that completely ruins Star Wars. You might as well make a documentary about extremists and civil war in the middle east.
This shows what is wrong with people today: They do not dare to dream anymore.
Everything is measured by numbers as influenced by our thinking today: The size of explosions, how high your pulse is when you watch something exciting, and how realistic the movie looks. People have forgotten what DREAMS ARE.
Let me break this down for you:
- What is the chance that people living in a galaxy far away use the same rhetoric as western propaganda? Why would they think of themselves or others as “terrorists” or “extremists”?
- Star Wars has always been subtle with hiding violence, but this was a movie with extreme scenes, for example a giant robot hitting somebody the straight in the face. No clipping. This is something children watch!
- Main characters dying in something like a nuclear explosion… no need to say more… when the stupid world leaders are regularly threatening each other that the innocent people the others trying to protect will get a nuclear bomb dropped on them, unless they stop doing the silly little thing they don’t want them to do. This is the world today on the news.
I believe George Lucas was right when he said “People do not understand, Star Wars is about family stuff”, at the time he sold it to Disney.
It goes deeper than what most people think, because when the fan does not like what Lucas is doing, they are not patiently trying to model his mind, but instead go on social media to tell how awful director he is. All right, he is maybe not the best director out there. But, he is George Lucas.
Lucas understands that “family stuff” is not just about the fights we find ourselves in, or the choices we do. Star Wars was never much about a war between the empire and rebels, but about turning your father over to your cause. The war is just a vehicle to deliver the message. Plots are there to trick you. The movies were set up to make people identify with the struggle, and then hit them with a sledge hammer of the new perspective, that the key to winning is not just about banding together, but to get into somebody’s heart, and that person might be the one you have learned to hate the most.
Like the hippies tried to do in 60s and 70s when they saw the inhumane and violent direction society was moving in. This was where the phenomenon Star Wars came from. Problems that are still problems today because leaders have not learned to listen. We have failed to turn them over to our cause. No matter how many people agreed in a given age, it did not help, because we need the monstrous dark jedi who can take off his mask and kick the evil emperor down the stairs, or drop him in the generator ventilation shaft, whatever is more convenient.
The first time I heard of Star Wars was when listening by hours of a friend telling me, and when I watched the movies it was even more mind blowing than I had imagined. Would I desire to watch the new movies if he told about them today? (hint: the answer is no)
Who can tell this story, if Star Wars no longer tells it?
Star Wars no longer gives me the feeling when I look at the stars through a telescope. It lacks the emotions of awe that I get when my brain suddenly realizes that the faint light from those stars have been there, always, even when I never thought about it or could not see it. The sky that has a fingerprint wherever direction you turn, it has a face looking down at us. We, living at a small rocky planet, fighting our stupid wars, and never once in a while stopping to think what the future generations will think about us, or how pathetic or irrelevant or choices, not because we are small, but because of the GREATNESS that lies just beneath under our skin, the potential that we will reach in the future.
Or, simply because Star Wars is helluva story about a trivial better ending than Disney ever made, and we can afford to get into the details about jedi outfits and combat techniques to make time pass by. Because, the original three episodes nailed it.
The new Star Wars gives me feeling of looking back on earth in 2016, a year nobody will ever care about, a culture that is dying and collapsing on its weight, and a language and way of thinking that is not useful for anything but struggling to hold on to the points we have on our bank accounts, living in terror of the world around us.
Maybe George Lucas realized he never could get people to see Star Wars the way he did, so he gave it all up just to give tell us this way, as he knew what Disney would do and could predict the result: First, the nervous breakdown of the monopolistic media company getting their hands on the holy grail, and then the carefully optimism when Star Wars 7 was not that all bad. Until Disney starts adding extra bolts and glues with duck tape, polling off body parts and pasting them on elsewhere, and showing you the mirror of what you have become, all while playing relaxing music and a voice telling you “how beautiful you are”.
However, I do not to blame Disney for the world situation. All they had to do was protect the dream. Even if they fail, there is still the original episodes that captured the message for eternity. Yet, it feels a bit like reversing the order of the New and Old Testament and telling christians to stop forgiving and start stoning each other, that is how deep the betrayal has become.
A message to Disney: Please start doing the right sort of mistakes! Don’t freak out by the high expectations, that will carry over in the perfect technically politically relevant story of yours. F*** politics! Let dreams live on!
If I want to watch violence, I can turn on the news.
What I go to see a Star Wars movie for is the impossible scenario where an evil powerful person pays attention to a little guy and listening. I want to see funny aliens and side characters that not only are considered the lowest of the lowest, but also wiser and more powerful than we could imagine. Because, this “family stuff” is how humans can relate to each other and feel compassion about a common cause, not because of numbers on a screen or because the world ends in eternal slavery if we fail, but because we are great beings because we are great beings, no matter how others judge us.
Never forget how to dream