They’re all that remains to me from Star Wars, perhaps because the universe just isn’t particularly interesting once overexplained and demystified.
Dominic Pino said that he’s “all Star Wars–ed out” earlier today, and his reaction was not so much to the news that an aggressively woke (yet virtually unknown) female director is being tasked with bringing the next Star Wars film to the screen. (It almost feels like some weirdly perverse flex from Kathleen Kennedy to demonstrate who still calls the shots.) No, Dominic cashed out of the entire Star Wars game after exhaustion from the terrible Disney trilogy.
As an old curmudgeon, I can do him at least three better than that, of course: I’ve never bothered to even see the original prequel trilogy (The Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones, and Revenge of the Sith). The first of them came out when I was a senior in high school, busy graduating and applying to college. After seeing the reviews and hearing from friends after Week One, I lost interest. The next two? Forget it, Jake — I went to college in Baltimore, and the only safe movie theaters were located miles and miles away by cab. I saw half of the J. J. Abrams one before turning it off distractedly. I caught Rogue One when I was bored once — it wasn’t bad.
And that’s the sum total of my Star Wars experience, an indifference curiously unreflective of how much I obsessed, like every other child of the Eighties, over the original trilogy and its various toys (action figures, trading cards; heck, we had an original Millennium Falcon). I suppose that, as much as I loved the wonder and vision of that original trilogy — and I kept enjoying it when I returned to it later, mind you — it was terminated business for me, emotionally and in terms of my maturation. I was more obsessed with the Xenomorph from the Alien films than anything from the Star Wars universe — probably because nothing from Star Wars could haunt my dreams like that . . . thing.
But two things about George Lucas’s prequel trilogy fascinate me nonetheless: first, the fact that while the films are themselves quite simply not good (sorry, Dominic, Jack Butler is correct on this one), they now — in the sort of ironically hilarious turn only years and entropy can provide — look like monuments to creative vision and narrative ambition compared with what Disney excreted when given sole control over the universe. As Walter Sobchak might have said about him, “say what you will about George Lucas, but at least he has an ethos.” I am familiar with these films only through having seen large chunks of them on YouTube and through the osmotic cultural absorption that any reasonably aware person experiences. (It’s the same reason I know the general outlines of the Marvel universe despite only having seen Iron Man once, back in 2005 — you can’t avoid this stuff.) But Lucas at least had a story he wanted to tell, he knew where it started and ended, and he understood something about his characters’ motivations and arcs, however poorly characterized and plotted. The less said about Disney’s Star Wars — not just after The Last Jedi’s “subversion of expectations” by director/writer Rian Johnson but even during Abrams’s tired retread of a reboot — the better. (And all this before, somehow, Palpatine returned.)
Second, even though the Lucas trilogy is not genius in any way, it has been strangely generative of secondary genius in the world of commentary and parody on YouTube. For someone who loves movies (as well as bad movies), it is impossible not to remember how it was a clinical (and characteristically quirky) deconstruction of the original Star Wars: The Phantom Menace and its sequels that first launched the well-loved film- and TV-commentary channel RedLetterMedia into prominence. The pieces were themselves half critique, half dark comedy character sketch (the “reviewer” has, uh, issues) and were vastly more incisive and witty than anything put on screen by George Lucas himself, a point noted at the time. And then there’s Auralnauts, which has gloriously repurposed the footage (but not the dialogue, which is all convincingly redubbed with voice actors who sound for all the world like the originals) of the original six films to tell a completely insane story about the origins of the Jedi Order (as Qui-Gon Jinn explains to young Anakin about midi-chlorians: “it’s heroin”) and Darth Vader that has nothing whatsoever to do with the original plot and is vastly superior to it in all ways, including in its dance-off scenes.
That’s all Star Wars remains to me, really, as a child who grew up with it. I can’t say for sure the reason why, though I’m partial to the thesis that the universe itself just isn’t particularly interesting once overexplained and demystified. I nevertheless find it fascinating that even though the films themselves after the original trilogy hold little value for me, the secondary works that modern internet creators have made out of them have become some of my favorite things to watch on YouTube. A commentary on enduring schlock value, I suppose.