Jack Attack Tuesday – 7/21/15 – Too Much Star Wars, Yay or Nay?
Jack Attack Tuesday
Too Much Star Wars, Yay or Nay?
I’d be lying to you (poorly) if I said the original Star Wars Trilogy isn’t my absolute all-time favorite trilogy. There have been some amazing contenders, specifically Lord of the Rings, but for my money nothing in the realm of entertainment has ever made such a lasting imprint on me the way Star Wars has. Some of my earliest memories were of watching Return of the Jedi over and over again on VHS, having no concept of the fact that there were “other” movies in the series until my Uncle Bill hooked me up with copies of Episodes IV and V. Before that, all I knew was Jedi, which in a lot of ways was a blessing in disguise. Jedi is very publicly the least well-liked of the trilogy, but for me that has never been the case. When your only exposure to Star Wars is the least liked film, and when you’re so young that you’ll go on monthly binges of watching nothing but that one movie, it does wonders for your taste later in life. Of course, after seeing the other two films, I slowly but surely came to love them all equally, as I do today. Sure, we can nitpick whether or not the twist in Empire even remotely makes any sense, or we can laugh at the clear smears of Vaseline on the lens to mask the Landspeeder’s wheels in A New Hope, but why? The sum total of that trilogy is something truly amazing that has rightfully earned its label as the most sought-after entertainment brand in the world. That was, until, the Prequel Trilogy, where everything went to shit.
If you’re a fan of bad movies then you’d be hard pressed to find three more peculiar and awe-inspiring monuments of failure. When viewed as a trilogy, the films have few redeeming qualities. For instance, Ewan McGregor as Obi-Wan Kenobi was an inspired choice. He truly made the part his own and blended the wisdom of Alec Guinness with his own more youthful sensibilities and is still the standout performance of the trilogy. That’s not to say his performance is sometimes awful in its own right, but more on that later. You see, many have gone out on a limb and blamed George Lucas, solely, for the failure of these movies. When measuring them in dollars and cents, they are a rousing success without question. The biggest issue with these films is the lack of finesse and development as an artist on the part of Lucas, where he somehow manages to take Academy Award winning/nominated actors like Natalie Portman and Samuel L. Jackson and make them sound as if they have all the personality of a wet noodle. The directing and writing is at the center of the mess that is the Star Wars Prequel Trilogy, an abomination that most of us wish never happened.
Without going into the gory details, we all know where things are now. Disney owns Star Wars, Kathleen Kennedy is producing and masterminding the universe, Lawrence Kasdan is involved in several of the films now in development and it’s being kickstarted by JJ Abrams. Disney did everything in their power to remove Lucas from the equation, leaving him on with no more than a producing/story credit on the upcoming film. This is a good thing across the board. In fact, their main selling point behind this year’s Comic Con panel was to hammer the idea into our heads that the film is being made with “real, practical effects”, something that is welcome but annoying to hear over and over again. Despite all of this, here’s the thing…this past year is the last one where we won’t have a new Star Wars film on the horizon. Think about that. The only studio to do something near this level of production is Marvel Studios…coincidentally paired with Disney as well. There’s no argument that Marvel’s business model is the new Hollywood trend with everyone from Jurassic Park to Fast & Furious trying to build their own “universes”, but is this a good thing for Star Wars? We’ve all wanted this for a long time. Someone to come in and do another GOOD Star Wars film. I make no qualms about it, I am in the camp of wanting more of this universe on screen. My rationale is simple, and is tied to this past week’s Ant-Man.
Ant-Man shouldn’t have worked as well as it did but it proved a bunch of things to me all once. Slap “Marvel” in front of your movie and you will be #1 at the box office without question (see last year’s smash hit “Tyler Perry in Marvel’s ‘Medea Goes Transgender'”). Seriously though, you had a troubled pre-production, mostly unknown character, kind of bland trailers/promos and a director best known for rom-coms. It shouldn’t have worked, but it did, and I think it had to do with the corporate machine that is Marvel Studios. Marvel is bigger than any one piece of its films at this point, so much so that they can “will” their films to success. Granted, there have been some duds in the MCU, but they’ve done a good job taking the good elements from the shittier entries and using them later to further validate the company’s ideology, i.e. using older Howard Stark in the opening moments of Ant-Man. So let’s apply that logic to Star Wars. Will all the films be great? No, but odds are a few of them will be. Right now we have a 50/50 chance of Episode VII being a great film. People, it could very conceivably be an awful movie. All signs point to it hitting us right in the childhood with references to the original films, but honestly, this film could be a gigantic kick to the nads outside of that.
Where do I stand? I’m ok with this plan. I know Marvel is what Marvel is now but their structure has been imitated to give us Fast Five, the upcoming Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice/Suicide Squad and even the Rocky spinoff Creed. We can rage about the finer points of quantity over quality but in all honesty, so what? If they keep trying, odds are some of what we’ll be getting will be pretty good. Well, at least 50% of it.
So what do you think? Are you happy about the upcoming plan over the next few years or would you rather they left it alone? Let us know below! Enjoy your week and Binge On!
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