Dominic is right. I’m exhausted — even more exhausted than I was when I saw The Rise of Skywalker shortly before the pandemic began and had to live with the reality that that schizophrenic episode of a film was my last theatrical experience before hunkering down indoors.
Disney has hired a director who says she likes to make men uncomfortable, and, like Dominic, I find it hard to care. It’s hard to disagree with this sentiment:
I enjoyed the movies that existed when I was growing up. I had Star Wars toys and played Star Wars video games as a kid. I saw The Last Jedi and Rise of Skywalker, the two most recent movies, in theaters.
They didn’t make any sense. Not for nerdy reasons such as being inconsistent, or whatever, though that might be true as well. I just found the stories to be impossible to follow.
Yeah, those two movies were bad. Real bad. Incredibly bad, in fact. So bad that I wish I could wipe them from my memory. (Actually, I had a conversation with a friend recently wherein we discussed the correct order to watch the films, and we both agreed that the sequel trilogy just doesn’t exist.) But Dominic misses part of why we can’t bring ourselves to give a Sith about Star Wars anymore.
Think about the Marvel Cinematic Universe, another franchise I’m happy to ignore. At one point, you could just watch Iron Man or the Captain America films or whatever else the studio pumped out onto the big screen and understand what was going on. Now, you’ll need to watch the million TV shows within the universe to have any clue. I doubt I’d want to do that even if they were good, and the shows being god-awful doesn’t help matters.
Which brings us to Star Wars. The Mandalorian was good, for the first two seasons at least, but you now have to watch that, The Book of Boba Fett, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Andor, Ahsoka, and presumably the forthcoming Skeleton Crew and The Acolyte to keep track of in-universe developments. Like Dominic, I loved Star Wars as a child. I still love Star Wars. I’ll even defend the prequels. But when it comes to committing myself to watching every single item Disney releases — I would do anything for George Lucas, but I won’t do that.