That’s right. I enjoyed The Rise of Skywalker to a reasonable extent because I had bailed on the “saga” decades ago and never bothered to catch up. I didn’t know or care about any of the characters, so I wasn’t disappointed that it didn’t make sense. Sure, I had a lot of questions, but I can live with ambiguity. I mean, “the Sith” are the bad guys, right? But did we ever see a Sith in the movie? What do they look like? Are they human? If that old ugly guy was a Sith, what’s the difference between a Sith and a human? At least an old and ugly one, I mean.
Since I didn’t know who anyone was, I just accepted that there was some sort of neo-Wagnerian incest vibe going on between the two leads, but exactly what wasn’t clear, but it seemed like the guy died because he kissed his sister, because in this movie it seems like it turns out that everyone is really related to everyone else. But the chick didn’t die because, chicks are allowed to kiss their brothers? Especially if the brother dies afterwards? Dunno.
Well, what was cool was the light saber fight with all the waves. I like the ocean, a lot, and seeing two-hundred-foot waves in slow motion was pretty cool, something I hadn’t seen a thousand times before, unlike, you know, the rest of the movie, which was some serious incest in itself, or I guess cannibalism, incorporating all the same riffs from the first two movies, which I did see, in “real time”, when they were first released, plus a few bits from Dunkirk, like when all the little “good guy” space ships show up, though what they’re supposed to do against all those mega battle cruisers was better left to the imagination of the audience, since the writers sure couldn’t come up with anything. They rode the Dunkirk theme a little more when all the “rebels” got out of their interceptors, looking like WWII pilots. I think they even had parachutes on, which don’t work in space.
It seems as if if you saw all the Star Wars movies, you were pretty disappointed in this one. Well, sorry, suckers! You should have been smart, like me!
Afterwords
About half way through the very first Star Wars film in 1976, I realized that George Lucas had aimed the film at the 12-year-old boy in all of us. Unfortunately, by that time, my 12-year-old boy was pretty blasé, fonder of aperitifs than adventure. I also wondered how a civilization that had perfected space craft that traveled faster than, you know, the speed of light, was still shooting them down with hand-aimed weapons. They didn’t have guided missiles?1
Of course I went to see The Empire Strikes Back, which I found definitely cheesy, so that I didn’t even care when poor Han got carbonized. I skipped the third, but when the fourth one came out, a decade or two later, I gave it a try, but bailed mentally when Jar Jar Binks showed up, perhaps the greatest unforced error in franchise history. This was a character who made Stepin Fetchit2 look good.
After that I skipped anything bearing the Star Wars label. Fool me three times, I get the picture. So watching the ninth was kind of like watching the second half of Götterdämmerung after skipping Siegfried and the second half of Die Walküre. You don’t know who anyone is, except that they’re all related, and why they’re doing what they’re doing, but the music’s great.3
In an earlier post I explained why Hopalong Cassidy is much cooler than Han Solo.
1. And am I the only one who thought R2D2 was a shameless rip-off of Herby the Love Bug?
2.Back in the sixties, a black friend of mine told me he thought Stepin Fetchit was funny, but could only laugh at him when no whites were around. I always found the character demeaning, though occasionally a movie would give the character a twist and have Stepin save the white folks’ bacon. The character made Lincoln Perry (his real name) a millionaire, which is certainly something. A “woke” (perhaps too “woke” in that it finds “depths” to the character that really aren’t there) biography is available from IMDB.
3. I guess. I’ve never made it to Götterdämmerung, bailing, in fact, half way through Siegfried. Das Rheingold is a lot of fun, and Die Walküre is great, but a little draggy. So excessive himself, Wagner invites excess in staging, and “woke” directors are more than willing to make fools of themselves in trying to “up” the master, so it’s hard to find watchable Wagner in modern, digital video, which I find is almost essential for enjoying opera at home. Digital video is so much crisper than you lose the sensation of watching a “second hand” performance, which always bothered me in the old days. Wagner’s Ring, and particularly the “moral” that power corrupts, had a significant delayed effect on the Star Wars saga, via its massive influence on Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, once that film franchise got going.
