The Last Blog Post (But Not Really Because This Is Only Part I...)

Both Thumbs were far sadder than this as they exited the theater...

The creation of each of my TTS posts up this point has been an act of joy.  This is not because I find blogging especially rewarding.  But I write a post once or twice a year at this point, for an audience of a half-dozen people.  If I’m not enjoying it, there is no point, so I write only when I will enjoy it.

I have not enjoyed writing about The Last Jedi.  Watching the Disney machine incompetently grind Star Wars into the dust is like watching a non-native speaker of a language randomly spit out words they have heard, having no sense of what they mean.  And it is made all the worse because, even though I should know better, I can’t help but get excited:  Rian Johnson.  Star Wars.  Luke.  There were numerous warning signs—the trailers, in particular, portended ill—but there is always hope.

I considered linking to one of the numerous pieces laying bare TLJ’s many flaws and signing off, but if this blog is anything, it is reliable.  (And by reliable, I mean that I sometimes post on a completely idiosyncratic schedule, and indeed have apparently locked myself out of my own account.)  So here I am, once again writing way too much about Star Wars.  At first, I couldn’t think of anything to write about, other than listing the myriad—and I mean myriad—flaws of this ridiculous monstrosity.  But then after a cathartic hour-long psychotherapy session with Left Thumb—who saw the movie four days after I did, i.e., he had four more days of innocence—I realized that I can do what The Last Jedi did not do.  I can explain how it should have gone, and why this movie so badly misunderstands Star Wars. 

But obviously I need to lay out a few flaws, first, if only for my sanity.  And then I’ll explain why Luke/Rey/Kylo was the most devastating failure, because it came close to capturing the Star Wars magic but ended up wasting what should have been a poignant, powerful story.  That adventure will naturally take us into what should have happened.  So this will be a two-part extravaganza, with the word count limits lifted and occasional drop ins from Left Thumb for comic relief.  And believe me, we need comic relief to get through even an abbreviated listing of the errors in this pathetic regurgitation of a Once-Great Modern Myth. 

I.                   None of This—None—Makes Any Sense.

This movie’s narrative absurdities make Independence Day look downright documentarian.  Let’s muse together. 

1.      From The Top

By the time the first sentence of the opening crawl was past, I could have left the theater and known the movie was going to insult my intelligence—and, for that matter, the intelligence of a rock sitting on a children’s book. (Left Thumb notes that, although my hyperbolic meaning here is clear, it’s worth pointing out that literacy rates among both igneous and metamorphic rocks have been holding steady since the Paleazoic era--sedimentary rocks, however, have really settled to the bottom.  I would like to note that Left Thumb's jokes have settled to the bottom.)  

In the opening crawl we learn that the entire Republic has fallen to the First Order in… a day? A week?  That was pretty convenient, what with our master storytellers needing the Republic to be gone so that we could replace it with the First Order and a Resistance that oh-so-cleverly changed their names since the 1980s.  The writers might have just as well started the opening crawl like this:

Episode IV

… and V

… and VI

… never happened.

I tried to come up with pithy, scathing remarks about just how stupid this whole thing is, but I am too tired.  They have worn me down.*  A movie that somehow tried to shoehorn a “Resistance” into a universe that had the good guys in control of the galaxy was succeeded by a movie that wants us to believe that the First Order magically replaced the Republic in a matter of days.  Never mind that the last thing we saw was the “Resistance” blowing up the First Order’s massive superweapon-home-base-retread.  Never mind that the galaxy has millions of star systems, and they didn’t all disappear overnight.  Never mind that the Republic has had more time than the Empire even existed to rescue the galaxy and bring in an era of supposed peace.  Nope.  All gone in a matter of days.

Nor is this mere plot-hole nitpicking.  It isn’t about “suspending disbelief” or any such asinine, overused, needs-to-be-put-down phrase.  If the only problem here were internal inconsistency, that would be awful, but it wouldn’t leave me despondent.  The problem is that Disney apparently believes that the only moral value (or at least, the only one that will sell) is the value of a plucky rebel.  And the only bad guys worth having are a knock-off of a knock-off of the freaking Nazis.  Disney seems to think that the Original Trilogy was some sort of political tale about throwing off oppression.  So, to continue that theme, they had to manufacture oppression, so that we could throw it off again! 

You know what would have been cool?  If the rebels were the bad guys.  That would have been cool.  And that is what the First Order was billed as in TFA: a growing threat in the outer rim.  But now, the First Order rules the galaxy and the Resistance’s only friends are in the outer rim?  Convenient.

2.      But Let’s Get Back to the Continued Degradation of Internal Consistency

Because my goodness is this movie dumb.  In the first scene, each character tries to one-up the stupidity of the character before them.  Hux—we’ll get back to him—wants to blow up the Resistance fleet, but instead of, you know, doing that, he engages in banter with Poe Dameron.  I was confused because for a moment I thought I had accidentally walked into a Marvel movie, with Robert Downey Dameron making jokes at the expense of the venom-spitting villain-of-the-month.  But then the First Order decides not even to defend itself as a single X-wing blows up all of its guns—yep, all of ‘em.  And then the Resistance uses its bombers in a suicidal frontal assault on a giant dreadnought (this strategy is made all the more inane when we realize that these are literally the Resistance’s last ships).  And then it turns out that a single bomber can blow up a Star Destroyer with a single payload? 

And of course, the entire time, you can bet that the only intra-squad chatter we get is along the lines of “stay with me!” and “let ‘em have it!” and “now or never!”  In A New Hope, Red Leader tells Wedge to “cut the chatter” when he makes a similarly silly remark (His offending remark was “Look at the size of that thing!” for those who don’t remember every word of the Original Trilogy off the top of their head).  Here, tomfoolery and useless rhetoric is apparently encouraged on official combat channels.**

But it gets better.  Next, the First Order tracks the Resistance fleet through hyperspace, which is dumb, but whatever.  It is the kind of detail they easily could have fixed by blaming it on a homing device or something.  Far more galling is the stupendously silly idea that the Resistance ships can move at sublight speed and stay far enough away from the First Order fleet to survive.  Are you kidding me?  I mean that question seriously: was this meant to be a parody about how people will accept anything in a movie that involves starships?  This is a universe with faster than light travel, and the Resistance ships are running away at sublight speeds.  Think about that. Or don’t, which is clearly what Disney was counting on.

But ooooooh it gets worse, because then we get a plan to destroy the one tracking device on the one Star Destroyer that has it.  Why does only one Star Destroyer have a tracking device?  I can see you’re thinking about that, too, so kindly stop.  Why can’t we blow up the Star Destroyer that has it?  Because then, uh, another Star Destroyer will start doing it.  At this point, even if you are trying to think about it, I imagine you are failing because there is just no way to put this insufferable insult of a plot device into the form of a rational thought.

But we’re not done!  To destroy it, we need a codebreaker, and there is only one person who can do it.  Because you see, despite taking place in a galaxy far far away, there are actually fewer people there than in El Paso.  To get that codebreaker, let’s leave our ship—which is being chased—and jet on over to a far away star system, and hope the First Order ignores us, because of course they will, right?  They’d have no reason to be suspicious of one little ship!  And I’m sure we’ll be able to find that one guy on an entire planet within six hours.  How hard could it be.

But eventually, all of this complicated chicanery is going to be pointless, because…

3.      Oh, We Didn’t Mention We Had the Ultimate Weapon?

Children, do you remember the Death Star?  It was special, because it could blow up planets.  Or, how about Star Destroyers?  They can blow up big ships.  Even starfighters are capable of greatness, like when they take out the shield generators on capital ships.

But as it turns out, these are all mere baubles, because the real power in this universe is a faster-than-light bomb.  You see, you can strap a hyperdrive onto something, point it in the direction of the thing you want to obliterate, and you will obliterate it, because, duh, you just sent a bomb going faster-than-light straight into the thing you want to obliterate.  So the Resistance decides to do that with a big capital ship. 

Historians noted that this tactic was a startling innovation in warfare that revolutionized space battles in the Galaxy Far Far Away.  Factories began producing drones with small hyperdrives so that every self-respecting fleet now has an armory of planet-destroying hyperspeed superweapons at its disposal.  There is no need for proton torpedoes or blasters or bombs anymore.  Nor was there ever, it turns out, but every soldier in the GFFA was a dunce until Laura Dern got the bright idea to just ram her ship into the enemy real fast.  Purple hair works wonders for the brain, historians speculate.

But can it protect you from turning into Mary Poppins?  Because…

4.      Leia Is Vacuum-Proof Mary Poppins Now

I don’t have much to say about this.  It was cartoonish and ridiculous.  Plenty of ways to have Leia show her resolve and strength while daringly surviving an attack on the bridge.  They went with supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.***

*Left Thumb was more than happy to assist by providing said pithy, scathing remarks, and he prepared an entire list of gems (or so he tells me).  He says that a freak computer glitch resulted in the loss of 53 pithy, scathing remarks, mostly centered around comparisons between Wookiees and "yo mama."  These pithy, scathing remarks were apparently his finest work ever, but Left Thumb was too discouraged to recapture that bottled lightning.

**Left Thumb notes that everyone knows that the second rule of any effective empire is: “In battle, let there be no Tomfoolery on the bridge and no Shenanigans in the engine room.” The first rule, of course, is: “Make sure no one can get rich except by selling you weapons.”  That one will make more sense in a bit.

***Left Thumb notes that in a deleted scene at the end of the movie, Leia assuages our fears that the rebel movement has been reduced to about a dozen people by pulling the rest of the Resistance out of her handbag.

II.                This Universe Looks Suspiciously Small

Star Wars has always depended on its groundedness.  Before people start throwing shoes at me, I don’t mean that Star Wars is believable in the history-book sense of the term.  But one of its main selling points, the thing that immediately differentiated Star Wars from other, crappy space fantasies, was that the galaxy always came across as a lived-in place that was real to these characters.  

Obviously I can’t go visit Tatooine, but it never felt like Luke and Obi-Wan didn’t believe that Tatooine existed.  There were broken speeders, banal poverty, scumbags and saints, lots of people in between, all the little details of an economy that doesn’t exist solely to fuel the central conflict in the movie we happen to be watching.  The Empire had troopers on Tatooine, but it was distant enough from the core concern of the Empire that it didn’t have utter dominion over the place—there were Hutts with great, illegal power, there were cantinas that didn’t have a domineering police presence, there were doors the stormtroopers couldn’t unlock. 

In the well-tread paradox of storytelling, it is the little, throwaway details that make a fictional world seem large and inhabited.  Luke offers to take Obi-Wan to Anchorhead because it isn’t as far as Mos Eisley and he wants to get home to do his chores.  The bartender says no droids in his cantina because—well, who the heck knows why, but it wasn’t because he was secretly an imperial spy or some such nonsense.  Two stormtroopers on the Death Star make freaking small talk while Obi-Wan deactivates the tractor beam.

By contrast, everyone and everything in The Last Jedi is directly related to the ongoing conflict; there is nothing in this universe except for the story. I won’t go through the whole list of offenders, but the most obvious example is when Rose—we’ll get back to her, too—waxes poetic about income inequality on the casino planet.  Setting aside the D-plot moralizing that would be beneath a bad West Wing episode, her theory is that all these rich people are bad because they must have made their money selling weapons to the First Order.  Must have.  Every single damn one of ‘em. 

Never mind that there are millions of planets in this galaxy and presumably billions of ways to legitimately make money.  Never mind that the First Order hasn’t even been around for long, so all these people must be newly-minted millionaires.  Never mind the question of how exactly the First Order is paying for all of these weapons if the only economic activity in the galaxy consists of selling weapons to the First Order.  Never mind that there must be money to be made selling vices outside of the First Order.  Nope.  It’s all First Order, all the time.  They have infomercials and everything.  “Do you want to make money? Of course you do! And you know how to do it! Sell us weapons! We can guarantee good prices and we also guarantee that there is literally no other way to make money!  But wait, there’s more!” [Left Thumb note: these infomercials feature none other than the incomparable Admiral Billy Mays.]

Just as frustrating, The Last Jedi continues in the JJ Abrams style of storytelling, which is to say: no catching of the breath, no time to ponder, no sense of gravitas.  Every time you see a big ship, someone will blow it up, and they’ll replace it with a bigger one.  See a big explosion?  We’ll come up with an art portrait for the next one, as the blast crackles throughout an entire fleet.  Did a main character just die?  Onto the next scene!  There is no weight to anything.  Left Thumb thinks this is particularly pathetic because even illiterate sedimentary rocks understand gravity.

Where are the little details? Where are the dejarik games on the Falcon while our heroes endure a boring, lengthy trip in hyperspace?  Where is the build up for the Super Star Destroyer?  Where is the small talk about speeders going out of style?  This galling lack of atmosphere, mise-en-scene, scale, or any sense that there is actually a galaxy full of people to protect, makes the whole movie pointless. 

III.             And Yet, We’ve Seen This Before!

Though it fails to capture any of the detail of the Original Trilogy, The Last Jedi follows in The Force Awakens’ footsteps by cramming the exact same plot details together under new names.  But The Last Jedi is more ambitious.  Where JJ Abrams’ brainchild squished A New Hope into his movie, Rian Johnson smashed Empire and Return of the Jedi into his movie.  It would be funny if it were intentional.

1.      Let’s Start With An Evacuation

           

You know how The Empire Strikes Back began?  I’ll give you a hint: it involved the Rebel Alliance evacuating from a secluded planet as the Imperial fleet tries to snuff them out of existence.  So how did the Last Jedi begin… hmmm… surely they wouldn’t be that obvious.  I mean, they wouldn’t just recycle that entire idea.  Well, I guess that at the very least, they wouldn’t just repeat the same Imperial Walkers-style assault on a fortified Rebel position, right?  Oh, they waited until later in the movie for that?  How considerate of them.  
 

2.      Dagobah, but Prettier

Crusty old Jedi master smarting over his failures that led to the downfall of civilization?  Check.  Naïve, wide-eyed Force-neophyte?  Check.  Appearance of another Jedi master in ghost form to help the crusty old corporeal Jedi realize he needs to let up on the youngster?  Check.  But they did some things very differently, like for instance, instead of having a crazy dream sequence in a cave like Luke did, Rey has a crazy dream sequence in a sinkhole.  Mind. Blown.

3.      Bad Guy Kills Badder Guy At Insistence of Good Guy

The Snoke throne room scene is not bordering on parody, it is parody.  Vader—I mean Kylo—brings a shackled Luke—I mean Rey—into Palpatine’s throne room—err, Snoke’s throne room—in the hopes of converting her to the dark side, but then she convinces him to kill Snoke.  But it isn’t a total repeat because afterwards they kill some red guards real good. (And these guards fight with not-lightsabers that can nevertheless repel lightsabers? Why?  Non-lightsabers that repel lightsabers were a dumb idea in Revenge of the Sith, an even dumber idea in The Force Awakens, and it reaches its dumb zenith in The Last Jedi.)  

4.      The Emperor, Sort of.

Snoke is not exactly TLJ’s fault, because he came out of The Force Awakens.  But TLJ could have rescued him.  Rather than make him a crappy faxed image of the Emperor, they could have made him a tiny little trickster, or a man behind a curtain, or… anything.  Instead, we got a crappy faxed image of the Emperor. 

5.      A Walker Assault

Oh.  There it is.  For a second I thought they forgot it!

Here is Left Thumb’s take on the new walker scene:  It’s like the writers were in a room together and said, “Let’s do Hoth, but with SALT instead of SNOW.  Yeah, that’s right, we can have trailers where the gravelly-voiced narrator intones: Hoth, but this time, the ground bleeds!”

IV.             These. Characters. Suck.

A lot.  The new ones are useless and the old ones are misused. To the list!

General Hux, aka General Evil Man:  Returning to the smallness of the Disney Star Wars universe, Hux is everything wrong with these movies.  He’s a General Grievous-level caricature.  He has no defining characteristics except laughably incompetent evilness.  And don’t try to tell me they couldn’t do better.  Grand Moff Tarkin, Admiral Ozzel, Admiral Piett, Captain Needa, Moff Jerrjerrod—each of these OT Imperial officers has significantly less screen time, fewer lines, and mountains more personality than Hux.  They are sometimes arrogant, sometimes incompetent, sometimes afraid, and Admiral Piett is always smooth as a baby’s bottom—in other words, they are not broken records of hortatory evil.  Hux, conversely, is. 

Rose, aka Space Millennial:  Rose is somehow whiny, annoying, emotionally disastrous, and forgettable.  [Props to Pere Etienne for pointing out to me that this makes her a Space Millennial.]  Her most memorable lines are memorable for their enduring wrongness.  Putting aside her limited understanding of economics, she “saves” Finn from heroically sacrificing himself to save the Resistance—we’ll get back to that—and then justifies her actions on the basis that the Resistance  will not win by destroying evil but by saving those they love.

Oh man.  Where to start.  Let’s set aside that this is basically the entire lesson of the prequels and Original Trilogy.  As I have painstakingly explained before, the prequels showcase the great flaw of the Jedi, which was believing that they could defeat the Sith via warfare, that is, by suppressing or destroying evil wherever they found it.  The Original Trilogy was about atoning for that mistake, most obviously through Luke’s maturation and sacrifice.  Luke could have killed Vader but didn’t—instead, he gave himself up for his father and friends.  That sacrifice brought down the Empire by redeeming, rather than destroying, Anakin Skywalker.  So having Rose state this as if she discovered something new is basically an insult to the saga.

But more important than that:  Finn was trying to save those he loved!  He was trying to destroy the big-ass gun that was going to tear down the wall protecting the entire Resistance.  He was giving himself up for the greater good.  And Rose kept him from doing that.  Millennials are the worst.

But even beyond that, the idea that we should work to build upon the Good rather than hunt down Evil is fine as a general moral principle, but it isn’t a freaking battle tactic.  Rose “saves” Finn only for him to face certain death along with everyone else because, duh, Rose kept Finn from saving everyone else.  If not for Force-skype Luke and a deus ex machina secret path out the back of the mountain, they all would have died, thanks to Rose’s characteristically millennial selfishness.

Finn, aka Why am I here again?:  Rose’s actions were also a narrative catastrophe, because Finn needed to die.  It is abundantly clear that over the course of two movies, the writers have nothing for him to do.  His every appearance in this movie was superfluous.  The only memorable line he had was “Let’s go, chrome dome,” which joins the ranks of Hayden Christiansen’s attempts at flirtation as dialogue that haunts your nightmares.  Finn isn’t even a suitor for Rey anymore because Rey has a better one, i.e., Kylo.  If Finn had died, the stakes would have been raised, a dreadfully useless character would be gone, and I don’t have a third thing to say so I’ll just emphasize those first two.

Poe Dameron aka Robert Downey Dameron:  It was widely reported after the financial success of The Force Awakens that Disney ordered rewrites of The Last Jedi to involve more Poe, whom fans apparently liked.  As I watched the movie, I could practically see the rewrites on screen.  All the Poe in the movie is tacked-on, pointless, nonsense that slows the movie to a crawl.  Why would anyone care about his squabble with an admiral we’ve never met before?  To be sure, taking time away from those ridiculous casino scenes was a worthy goal, but maybe just get rid of both, hmm?  Not to mention that the entire contrived mutiny could have been avoided if the purple-headed admiral had told Poe to take a Chill Pill™ because she had a plan to land on a nearby planet.

Admiral Holdo aka Not Admiral Ackbar, Not Even Close:  Speaking of Laura Dern, her character is about as stiff and unnecessary as the rest of them, but can we talk about her “plan” for a second?  She is in the midst of a low-speed, Seventh-Heaven-style chase, apparently in a solar system with a former rebel base.  She is going to fly by that base and send everyone to its surface, in plain view of the giant-ass fleet following her.  And her plan was… maybe they won’t care?  You know, they’ll see all these freighters headed away but why bother with those, I’m sure those are just decoys, and it isn’t like our giant-ass fleet has more than enough ships to both follow the big ship and all the little ships.

Phasma aka Chrome Dome aka Oh I’m Dead Now:  Phasma was a character, and she died.  That’s all I’ve got here.  Left Thumb points out that she dies in a pit of fire, because that is how bad guys die, even the silly ones who have almost no screen time.  

Benicio del Toro aka Benicio del Toro: I guess Benicio del Toro wanted to be in a Star Wars movie and no one had the heart to turn him down?

General Leia aka Carrie Fisher Deserves Better:  Outside of flying through the vacuum of space and then being in a coma most of the movie, Leia got very little to do.  And we know she won’t be in the next movie, so it’s quite a shame.  Her goodbye with Luke should have been poignant, and Carrie Fisher exudes gravitas, but she’s surrounded by such incompetent rubes that you long for the days of General Riekaan and General Dodonna—or even General Ripper. 

Yoda aka Ghost Arsonist:  They somehow managed to make ghost Yoda look fake, which is weird, because ghosts should look fake, but not like this.  Also, Yoda should not be in this movie.  Also, he should not be burning down trees.  Did no one actually watch this scene before the movie went out the door?  Left Thumb notes that this is another scene made pointless by a subsequent revelation that Rey plucked the books at some point anyway. Seems to be a pattern: have an unnecessary but overly dramatic scene featuring some grand gesture—invariably involving fire—but then undermine the alleged point later on. I’d say lather, rinse, repeat, but this is more like ignite, burn, pretend it never happened, ignite, burn, pretend it never happened…

Snoke, aka [Insert Emperor Stand-in Here]: It boggles my mind that the Disney brain trust came up with Snoke.  I say “came up with” in the loose sense of the term because there is nothing to come up with.  It is as if they had a script where they were meaning to create a villain but forgot to do it.  This pathetic piece of leftover Lord of the Rings makeup seduced Ben Solo?  In addition to coming out of nowhere and disappearing into nowhere just as fast, Snoke is an idiot.  Grade-A moron.  Total nincompoop.  Kylo should have offed him years ago.  As Left Thumb put it, “Snoke is like a dried-up prune, and yes I know that prunes are already dried so you do the math.”

Not that you need it, but let’s review why Emperor Palpatine was a successful evil archetype.  The key point is that he was a powerful, thoughtful character who could see seven steps ahead on the chessboard—and is demonstrated doing so multiple times.  When he finally dies, it isn’t because he is dumb or because he needs to explain his villainous plan to Agent 007, it’s because he is deeply morally flawed.  Palpatine didn't guess that Vader would turn on him because he was so self-absorbed that he could not imagine anyone acting that way.  Palpatine was a master hunter of human weakness, and he was nearly always successful, because humans are so deeply flawed.  That Luke’s act of love could have any effect on Vader was beyond his comprehension.  Palpatine quite rightly calls Luke a “fool.”  By Palpatine’s calculation—that is, the materialistic, hedonistic calculation of self-first—Luke was a fool. 

Snoke, however, did not die because of any such moral flaw.  He died because apparently he doesn’t hear the scratching sound a lightsaber hilt makes as it rotates on your fancy throne. 

     V. Epilogue            

I have been waiting for a genuine, new continuation of the Star Wars mythos since I was four years old.  It is quite clear now that it is never coming.  We got prequels that were relatively strong in story ideas but incompetent in execution, and now we have sequels that are so outlandishly unimaginative that their main idea has been:  let’s do the Original Trilogy again… but in two movies instead of three!  Even the prequels, though rarely very good, were still usually Star Wars.  Disney hasn’t even managed that.  The Last Jedi^^ is a cheap repeat of the Original Trilogy that doesn't even understand the movies it is knocking off.  

^^Left Thumb was very disappointed in the title of this movie.  He notes that middle-of-trilogy-titles have four words, not three, and they have action verbs like “Attack” and “Strikes.”  This movie doesn’t deserve a title like The Last Jedi.  Left Thumb suggests the following possibilities: 

Star Wars: Agents of Shield

Star Wars: Chewbacca Goes Vegetarian and the Rest Doesn’t Really Matter

Star Wars: A Postmodern Mashup Fantasy

Star Wars: Pretty Soon These Will be Straight-to-DVD

Star Wars: You May Be Better Off with the Holiday Special

Star Wars: Snoke Jokes and Poe Pranks

Star Wars: It Turns Out Luke Is Lactose Intolerant

Star Wars: Master Pikachu, My New Name Is

$tar War$: Casino Royale

Star Wars: The Resistance Moves to a Smaller Apartment to Save on Rent

                                         *                   *                     *

But wait, you say.  What about Luke?  Rey?  Kylo?  You barely mentioned them, and they were the best part!

Part II is coming, wherein I explain the enormous missed opportunities and the devastation of Luke Skywalker, Jedi Knight.  

[Editor's note: Right Thumb may or may not have lost the credentials for his account, so all future posts will likely be "posted" by Left Thumb, even though written by Right Thumb.]

“Left with No Choice” – by Left, with No Choice

Greetings to the People’s Republic of the Internet! This is Left Thumb reporting for duty. It’s been far too long, I know, I know. As I wander back into the hypothetical and strictly mental office space of the Thumbs—remember, we were always pressed for funding because SOMEONE never donated*—a few thoughts pop into my head.

First, it’s really dusty around here. Seriously, it’s about as dusty as the part of Ayn Rand’s brain where thought occurs—that’s how long since we’ve really poked around in here, aside from some of Right Thumb’s self-styled “solo projects.”

Speaking of those solo projects—that was the second thought. It happens to be the Christmas season presently, which means I recently watched the incomparable classic It’s a Wonderful Life. And when I look back at all the recent Star Wars posts I can’t help but think:  this is like Clarence giving me a glimpse of what the blog would look like if I had never been born. Don’t get me wrong—Right Thumb is an indispensable half of the greatest dynamic duo ever to grace the planet.** But without both halves, the cozy, all-American Bedford Falls that is Two Thumbs Sideways shrinks into something more like Pottersville, a pale and perverted imitation of itself where everyone ends up kind of cranky.

With that in mind, here’s what I don’t have to offer you: 1) a good excuse for my three-year absence; 2) a joint post, which is really what this blog needs so desperately; or 3) a satisfying explanation for why monkeys do not ride goats off into the sunset. 

But here’s what I do have to give, in increasing order of importance: 1) a bite-size reflection on the greatest movie of the season, It’s a Wonderful Life; 2) a respite from Right Thumb’s sanctimonious slashing of subpar Star Wars films; and lastly, 3) your long-awaited dose of classic Left Thumb wit, whimsy, and wonder. I promise the rest of this post won’t be quite so self-referential and self-reverential. At least, I’ll try.

Question posed: Why do we love George Bailey so much?

Admit it: you love George Bailey. If you don’t, just stop reading. There’s no point in continuing because too many of our basic conceptions concerning reality are so out-of-sync that we can have no meaningful conversation whatsoever. Everyone loves George Bailey. If you don’t, you’re officially not part of “everyone.”

There are the obvious reasons, of course. He’s likeable, he’s funny, and he can apparently dance the Charleston pretty well. And of course, he’s Jimmy-freaking-Stewart, which always helps. Even when our man Jimmy plays an obsessive acrophobic stalker in Vertigo, we still like him. He’d probably even be likeable if Michael Bay had directed every single one of his movies, and the entirety of his screen time consisted of him slowly walking away from massive explosions—without looking back. (Actually, and I can’t believe I’m saying this, but that’d be pretty awesome.) Still, in the case of George Bailey, there are deeper reasons at work, of which I’d like to point out just two.  

Numero eins: George is someone to whom virtue does not come easily. He drags his feet all the way to his own sainthood, and we drag our feet with him. We feel his pain as his dream of attending college dies—not once, but twice.  We feel the guilt-tinged disappointment when he and Mary skip their own honeymoon to keep the Building and Loan afloat. Opportunity after opportunity for escape eludes him and it eludes us. The pain of sacrifice is palpable even as we know exactly what needs to be done—and even though we know it will end up better in the long run. It still hurts, and that rings true. George’s reluctant heroism is in contrast even to some of Stewart’s other most notable characters on screen. Mr. Smith, the hero of the “other” Capra/Stewart classic, is such a good guy through and through that he feels somewhat saccharine—the conflict is purely external, between Smith and the corruption in D.C. The drama comes from how out of place he is, not from any real internal struggle or journey. Kind of like if there were a movie about Right Thumb calmly becoming a lumberjack and growing a big bushy Bunyon-beard. Please, dearest internet—someone make that movie.

Number deux: George is constantly taking one step forward and two steps back. In his early twenties he rightly calls out Potter for his nefarious scheming, but later in life is almost willing to take a job from him. He seems fairly happy at points with his marriage, children, and friends, but when the excrement hits the proverbial air-conditioner, all the old demons come back, and he starts wondering if his life has amounted to anything at all. The promise of the “other life” he (and we) could be living never fully leaves him alone despite knowing it to be a fantasy. George has no great momentous conversion experience that settles his doubts once and for all, never to return. (At least, not until the end of the story, but that is more or less due to divine intervention which is kind of the whole point.) Again—it rings true to reality. For example, I used to operate under the illusion that when a person committed their life to prayer—say, oh I don’t know, in a Carthusian monastery—they become holy and never looked back. They certainly would no longer be the kind of people who were preoccupied with washbasins and things like that. But then I watched Into Great Silence and I realized that during our time on this side of the grave (which, if you're a Trappist, may not be long if the Carthusians have anything to say about it), we will always be fighting our own foibles and flaws. Right Thumb and I will always have to struggle with pride based on our superior intellects, and our blog cover models will have similar issues with their delirious good looks. It’s just the way it is, and George Bailey helpfully reminds us of such important things.

So, that about sums it up. Are these groundbreaking thoughts? Surely not. But remember that It’s a Wonderful Life does not require groundbreaking thoughts. It is that which we break ground in order to reach.***

Yours in peace, love, and Battlestar Galactica,

<<  L % E /\ F + T -<>- T * H {} U ~ M # B  >>

* That someone is you. Just in case you were wondering. If you’d like to repent of your miserliness at this late hour, feel free to send a check our way. Send it MY way, actually, as Right Thumb actually has what they tell me is called a Paying Job™ and seems to add a few inches to his plasma screen every week or so. I, on the other hand, subsist on mozzarella sticks and hopeless dreams. Anyway, just be sure to put “Left Thumb’s Corner Office Fund” in the check memo. Alternatively, “Search for the True Academician” still works.

** Condolences to the following runners-up: Batman and Robin, Han and Chewie, BCATSK (Right Thumb might disagree with that one…heh), Mario and Luigi, Michael Jordan and Scotty Pippin (it’s always amusing to see how many family members faint when I use a sports reference), Sherlock and Watson, KD and Russell Westbrook (for those still standing), peanut butter and jelly, and Calvin and Hobbes. Sorry, not sorry.  

*** I thought this line was a pretty profound ending for such a sapient piece of prose, but Right Thumb sadly informed me that it’s only a step above the great tragedy of Miracle on 34^th Street: “Which is worse: a lie that draws a smile, or a truth that draws a tear?” For that, friends, I am truly repentant. 

Rogue One Was Weird.

 

 

Warning: there are as many spoilers in this post as I could fit.  I tried to put a few more in, but the internet started to crash so I left it as is.   

One year ago, I was working on a merger involving two health care-related businesses, and I left an office Christmas party early to go watch a new Star Wars movie.  This year, I am working on a merger involving two health-care related businesses, and I left an office Christmas party early to go watch a new Star Wars movie. The merger is quite a bit higher-profile than last year’s merger, but the Star Wars movie is quite a bit lower-profile than last year’s. Otherwise, my life is apparently on a merry-go-round.

Rogue One is obviously a big, tentpole, blockbuster extravaganza, etc., but there was minimal anxiety. When The Force Awakens came out, there was a sense of hope but also fear that J.J. Abrams would totally screw it up—which, you know, he likes to do. By contrast, Rogue One was mostly upside.  If it was spectacular, cool. If it stunk, well it doesn’t even have a number! Begone you blacksheep illegitimate weirdo stepchild imposter.

Unsurprisingly, Rogue One was neither spectacular nor smelly. Somewhat surprisingly, the overwhelming sentiment—at least pour moi—was how weird it was.  Grand Moff Tarkin, played by Peter Cushing—who is, you know, dead—had a starring role.  Back in the cockpit were Gold Leader and Jek Porkins and all of the Rebel pilots who we first met at the Battle of Yavin.  Princess Leia, who hasn’t been young in a long time, was suddenly young again. Darth Vader, who hadn’t done much more than shout “Noooooooo!” in the past thirty-three years on screen, was again a presence.  The film interlaced these characters into the story as best as it probably could, but after having memorized every inch of the Original Trilogy over the course of hundreds of viewings, there was no way to hear (and see!) Gold Leader, Red Leader, etc., without being wrenched out of the in-film universe.  

And it was probably not a good sign for the movie that the things I remember most are the things the movie did not create—i.e., Vader, Tarkin, the Rebel pilots, Leia, etc.  The “new” characters were unmemorable (with one exception, see below), and the story dragged out of the gate and then limped through its grand finale at an uncomfortably slow speed.  For the first time in my Star Wars viewing experience (which is… pretty extensive), I was, at times, bored.

To be sure, there were some cool moments.  I liked the Star Destroyer floating over Jedha City.  Le Chiffre played Galen Erso well.  Mon Mothma was great.  And Gareth Edwards should be the only person allowed to introduce monsters, villains, giant space stations, or really anything, in silhouette behind a cloud of smoke. 

But there were too many unforced narrative errors.  For instance, it had a nice opening scene that set up the main protagonist and antagonist with aplomb.  But then it jumped all over the galaxy showing you things that it was about to explain to you anyway.  There were at least three disconnected scenes with characters we don’t know, doing things we don’t understand, before the Rebel Command explains everything to Jynn Erso.  Why did we have those earlier scenes? What was the point?

There was also the continued compression of time and space that makes the universe small and uninteresting.  In A New Hope, there were scenes on the Millennium Falcon where the characters literally played board games because they were traveling and nothing was happening.  In The Force Awakens and Rogue One, every journey is essentially instantaneous.  There is no sense of the vastness of the galaxy. 

The final battle was interminably long, and very little of it made sense.  I won’t go into the nitpicking here, but from a story perspective, there was no clear goal.  We were promised a Star Wars heist movie, but the movie failed to set up its heist.  Any good heist movie establishes the target, explains the security problems, and then unveils its solutions in clever fashion.  This heist was muddled, at best.  There were obstacles here and there, but they came out of nowhere and their solutions generally involved running back and forth across a beach.  Moreover, the goal kept changing.  First they wanted to steal the plans, then they wanted to transmit the plans, then they did transmit the plans but apparently only one ship got them?  Heists provide a ready-made formula; you shouldn’t need to be asking these types of questions.

More importantly, the movie failed to make me care that all of the characters died.  The problem, of course, is that none of the characters had personalities; none of them even had heist movie personalities.  In most heist movies, you have a planner, a grifter, a technical wiz, an explosives expert, an inside man, etc. Rogue One didn't even get that far. Let’s look at our lineup.  

 

Jyn Erso: sort of the leader?  She is generally bitter about life, and she starts to care about the Rebellion, but she has not a drop of humor or interest to her.

Cassian Andor: the Rebel spy. I have no more to say about him because I searched for a personality and now I'm sleeping.

Imperial Pilot Defector: you’d think he could be the Inside Man, but instead, this “cargo pilot” apparently becomes, in a pinch, a communications expert, a moral authority, and a miraculously cured mental patient.  His only character trait, besides being a plot resolution device, is being weirdly wimpy for a defector.

 Chirrut Imwe: his role is to (1) be blind, (2) mumble a nonsensical mantra about the Force that makes you want to clog your ears with the first thing you can find and if it turns out to have been a half chewed sour patch kid fine just make it stop, and (3) contribute to further ruining any internal universe coherence by using martial arts and a stick to incapacitate armored soldiers holding actual weapons (and did I mention he’s blind?). At least he had a good joke, though.

Baze Malbus: his role is to be large and shoot at things.  A heist movie needs a guy like that.  If anyone else had a personality, his role would be more acceptable.

K-2S0: the comic relief, reprogrammed Imperial security droid. He was hilarious. He did his job. When K-2S0 “died,” I was saddened. There was sadness. It was a moment lacking in mirth.  I don’t think it’s a good thing that the character I cared about the most was the droid.

 

And on the villain side, did someone forget to create an actual character for Director Krennic?  His role in any scene was to be as evil and angry and deluded as possible.  Krennic randomly shot ten Imperial engineers because… that’s what Evil People do!  Of course, the Original Trilogy understood that evil is more insidious and more terrifying when it isn’t irrational, but that kind of nuance has no place in the new millennium, I guess.  If anything, all Krennic did was reveal how much more interesting Grand Moff Tarkin is. 

And that was a general problem: the only characters and moments that meant anything were either pulled directly from the Original Trilogy or had meaningful ties to it.  When Red 5 got shot down in the space battle, that was cool only because we knew that Red 5 had to get shot down because otherwise there is no Red 5 available for a far more interesting character to pilot in a far more interesting battle soon thereafter.  When Bail Organa says he is choosing someone he would “trust with his life,” it’s a great moment, but only because we already know about Princess Leia.  Similarly, when Bail returns to Alderaan, it is a poignant moment, because we know that he and millions of others will soon die there. 

All that said, where the characters failed, the imagery did not.  (In hindsight, I suppose it was predictable that the guy who directed Godzilla would be visually talented but unable to craft a character or weave a meaningful story line.)  There were Star Destroyers, there were AT-ATs, there was the Death Star being constructed, there were shots of the Death Star coming over the horizon, there were awesome shots of the Death Star blowing things up, there was that awesome arrival of the Devastator at the end when it wipes out the Rebel fleet, and then there was:

The Darth Vader scene.  I am wildly conflicted about this scene. On the one hand, it was utterly gratuitous and entirely out of character.  Vader doesn’t concern himself with random Rebel troopers.  His Stormtroopers would have taken care of boarding a Rebel ship, which we know because that’s what they'll do in roughly ten minutes at the beginning of A New Hope.  Moreover, it was previously well understood that Vader’s physical prowess had deteriorated in the many years between Revenge of the Sith and the Original Trilogy.  His duel with Obi-Wan on the Death Star is stilted and decidedly non-acrobatic because Vader had no reason to keep up his skills; he thought all the Jedi were dead, he didn’t know he had a son, and he had a literal Imperial Army to do his fighting for him.  The drastic improvement in Vader’s combative arts between A New Hope and Empire Strikes Back was a result of him reapplying himself over the course of years, as he realized that Luke was out there.

On the other hand, holy @#$%!. I mean, holy %#$$@$#^%$&%*%*#$@^%^$%&%^#*%*#%!

And that more or less sums up the experience.  It was weird, mostly gratuitous, choppy, often boring, and it did not make much sense, but holy—

~Right Thumb~     

The Noble Futility of Lightsaber Duels

I rarely (never?) spend an entire post responding to a single article, but this article was about Star Wars, more specifically the lightsaber duels, more specifically their comparative quality, more specifically the way they reflect (or fail to reflect) the moral themes of the films. To say that such an article is in my wheelhouse would be useless, because I don’t know what a wheelhouse is or why it would be relevant, but longtime readers (all six of you) will know that the linked article addresses points that comprise 95% of my Two Thumbs Sideways posts.  To top it all off, the article is good (what were the odds!). But I think he misses one key point. This will be fun.

The article is spot-on in its diagnosis of the thematic impact of the Original Trilogy duels. To be sure, it fails to give the ESB and ROTJ duels the credit they deserve as sumptuous visual feasts.  The ESB duel, in particular, is the closest that Star Wars comes to surrealism (the carbon-chamber platform is more of a dreamscape than an actual physical location), which is pitch-perfect because the duel—as is true of all Star Wars duels—is an expression of a battle of wills, not a mere physical exercise. Nevertheless, the point remains: the OT duels are superb because they mirror and catalyze the character arcs and central moral dilemma: how does one respond to evil? The Original Trilogy’s answer was, of course, love, i.e., sacrifice, self-gift. In A New Hope, Obi-Wan sacrifices himself not only to save the younger heroes but to show Luke—and, to some extent, Vader—that physical dominance is not the path to salvation.  In ESB, Luke refuses to let his friends sacrifice themselves for the Cause; accordingly, he winds up in a disastrous, damaging conflict that, in a stroke of poetic justice, puts his friends in greater danger by requiring them to reverse throttle and rescue him.  Finally, in ROTJ, Luke is willing to sacrifice himself for his friends and his cause, only to be goaded into a violent frenzy—but then, he controls himself and, as acknowledged by the hyperlinked raison d’être for this blog post, he can finally, accurately, name himself a Jedi. And that sacrificial act saves his father and brings down an empire.

The article is also generally correct on the prequel duels, in terms of their failure as thematic points, but the author misses the mark when he suggests the failure owes to the duels’ incorrect themes as opposed to their poor execution.  The author argues that the prequel duels are discordant because they valorize war-like strength and triumph in a saga that, at its core, is about rejecting a might-makes-right worldview. 

But the prequel duels were meant to play directly into those themes.  The leitmotif of the prequels, poorly executed but perceptible in their better moments, was simply an inversion of the Original Trilogy: if self-sacrifice and a rejection of the eternal Jedi-Sith war leads to salvation (OT), selfishness and an attempt to win that war through force of arms leads to destruction (prequels). The most obvious example here is Anakin’s fall, but the more interesting (and lesser developed) failure of the prequels is that of the Jedi. They see the Sith as a violent threat that requires a truculent response. They even hide their own inadequacies from the Senate, the public (and their own members) rather than show “weakness.”  Accordingly, the prequels should show the futility of the flashy, attractive, hyper-violent, and aggressive duels in which the Jedi engage.   

The prequel duels fail to achieve that purpose, but it is a failure of execution, not intent. The most obvious illustration is the utter failure of the climactic Episode I Duel of the Fates.  This is a horrible, rotten, no-good, dumb, disastrous lightsaber conflict.  It is interminable for no reason; has not one word of dialogue (well, okay, it has one: "Noooooo!"); and pits unfamiliar characters against each other.  (I fail to understand even why people think it is visually arresting—the choreography is clunky, the sets are silly and unmemorable, everything is too bright, the whole thing is absurdly contrived—but I digress.)  At the same time, the idea is present that anger, aggression, a will to win at all costs, etc. are, in fact, advantages in a Jedi-Sith duel.  Obi-Wan triumphs only because he gets pissy.

It is easy to take that point—Obi-Wan “wins”—and draw the conclusion that the duel mistakenly grants honor to a might-makes-right aesthetic. But the failure was one of execution, not concept.  For instance, in ROTJ, Luke also  triumphs over Vader due to a sudden fit of sibling-protective belligerence. Yet few viewers would come away from that duel thinking "gee whiz, good thing Luke got all riled up!" Luke's subsequent introspection and rejection of violence, Vader's suddenly pitiable countenance, the Emperor's goading, etc., make clear that Luke's outburst was a mistake, or at the very least, futile. By contrast, Episode I fails to establish adequately that Obi-Wan’s “triumph” over Darth Maul was a pyrrhic victory; if anything, Obi-Wan's aggression in Episode I is accidentally lauded. The ending of Episode I is “happy”—there’s literally a parade—even though later films would reveal that, in actuality, the Jedi, Amidala, the Senate, etc., played directly into Palpatine’s hands. The denouement of Episode I was a triumph for the Sith, not the Jedi. That the movie fails to make this apparent is a fault but not a fault particularly attributable to the duel.

The lightsaber duels at the conclusion of Episode II suffer similar failures.  Obi-Wan’s attempt to tangle with Dooku is a somewhat stilted affair, but if it is seen as a misguided-yet-noble attempt to eliminate the Sith, it has a kind of tragic aspect to it. Obi-Wan loses because he will never win this battle. He is, in a sense, too virtuous to triumph. Unlike the impetuous, emotional Obi-Wan of Episode I, the mature Obi-Wan has control of his emotions; but he cannot overpower Dooku’s sadism and years of darkly festering self-aggrandizement. Obi-Wan has not—yet—discovered the key to defeating the Sith, and so he fails, plain and simple.

Anakin’s attempt to meet Dooku’s aggression with his own is an interesting parallel to Luke on Cloud City. Both father and son hope to “save” their friends, both rely on emotion and physical prowess in combat, and both lose appendages. Each has given in to a Hobbesian, might-makes-right, amoral landscape, and each, being weak, is irreparably damaged. (Both get a second attempt, and their responses are diametrically opposed, but we’ll get back to those.)

These two Dooku duels would probably look better on reflection if not for the disaster that follows them. There is perhaps no more disturbing non-Jar-Jar sequence in Star Wars than that of a ridiculous, two-foot-tall CGI whirlwind out-maneuvering Dooku.  I have no defense for the practicalities of this duel.  Yoda never should have had to duel. His strength in the Force is such that Dooku should have trembled in his wake and never been able to move.

But if we set aside the logical incoherence, the duel is another example of a Jedi in the prequels failing to achieve anything through physical combat.  Yoda is the superior swordsman, but what does that fact accomplish? Dooku escapes, the Clone Wars commence, etc. The major failing of the duel on screen is that it lionizes this failure in its celebration of the “coolness” of seeing Yoda do something other than limp. And for those who wonder why anyone ever thought this was cool, remember that people burst into applause during the original theatrical run. The audience, too, was suckered into the notion that the satisfying and efficacious response to evil is superior physical power.

Returning to Anakin’s parallels with Luke, in Episode III Anakin obtains a rematch with the man who owes him a limb—much as his son would decades later.  Anakin, like his son, is now stronger and more experienced.  Anakin, like his son, deprives his antagonist of a limb(s) in a duel before Palpatine. Of course, the major difference is that Anakin goes where his son refused to go and murders Dooku. This is not exactly subtle stuff, but it is thematically correct. But this duel fails, too, because the trappings are so light as to blow away. The set is obnoxiously fake, the duel arises so early in the film that no stakes of any kind have set in, the score is so unmemorable I barely even remember if there was a score--and, most hideously, Dooku, formerly a scion of elegant, oily, evil nobility, is ruined forever by his entirely unnecessary introduction through a CGI somersault that I wish I could unsee.

The prequel duel that comes the closest to achieving its intended themes is the Anakin vs. Obi-Wan contest on Mustafar. There remains the deeply tragic aspect in that Obi-Wan, paragon of virtue though he is, can never win this duel. He “wins,” but in doing so accomplishes little more than unleashing Darth Vader on the galaxy. Moreover, this duel does a serviceable job of establishing the absurdity of what Obi-Wan is doing. The duel is chock-full of the same acrobatic, whirling, choreographed, samurai-esque skills as the other prequel duels, but on this occasion they are revealed, rightfully, to be pointless. The duel choreographers tried to make it look like the two combatants were essentially mirroring each other—they knew every move, jink, and juke the other had, and no one would ever get anywhere. Reasonable minds can differ, but the heavily-stylized Anakin/Obi-Wan dance number plays that tune for me.

When Obi-Wan and Vader duel on the Death Star almost two decades later, they are still locked in the same never-ending combat that they began on Mustafar and that no one will ever win.  But at this point Obi-Wan finally breaks the standoff by giving his own life, saving the young heroes and proving that he did learn the lessons of the last war. To physically challenge the Sith is, in some sense, to lose. The Sith made conflict their weapon and conquered the galaxy. Obi-Wan, Yoda, and through them, Luke, were only victorious via a rejection of power-plays; it was in giving up material power that they restored the potential for peace.

No doubt, some of the prequel duels are simply indefensible on any level (let’s pretend the Obi-Wan/Grievous thing just never happened), and none of them perfectly strike the nails they were meant to strike. But the seeds are there. As with everything prequel-oriented, it could have worked, which makes it all the more frustrating that it did not.

~Right Thumb~

The Blog Awakens

(Warning: There Be Spoilers Ahead. And Possibly Ravenous Piranhas.)

It’s been a year or three since anyone updated this blog, but the re-release of Star Wars: A New Hope in theaters seems like as good a time as any to get back in the game. They even brushed A New Hope up a bit with a new name and new actors, and I daresay the TIE-Fighters look slightly different. (Okay, cheap joke, but what can I say? Left Thumb is off doing Important Medical Things, and he’s the one who brings the funny to this blog. Except the jokes about closed captioning. Those are all mine, baby.)

My style is more “amateur theological sanctimony applied to pop culture,” but I won’t bother you with any of that nonsense here. For one thing, given how late I am getting around to writing anything down, others have already written interesting things about how Kylo Ren is a (distressing) villain for the modern era, how The Force Awakens is a sign of the decline of civilization, etc. For another, The Force Awakens is more of a beginning than a full story, and it is hard to draw too many moral narratives out of it. (Similarly, twas not A New Hope but The Empire Strikes Back that provided the artistic and moral center of the Original Trilogy.)

All that is left, then, are my thoughts on the movie. Normally I wouldn’t assume those were worth writing about, but so many people have asked me, it is easier to write them down once and link people here.

As a subjective matter, my movie-going experience was incredible. When I sat down in the theater, I could not stop smiling. The possibilities were endless. Even though I fully expected the movie to disappoint me, it hadn’t yet, and it was the first truly new Star Wars movie in my lifetime. The prequels were exciting, but they were a story that we (more or less) already knew. Moreover, I knew I would never have this feeling again: the first truly new Star Wars movie I will ever see. Even if Rian Johnson makes Episode VIII into a masterpiece worthy of a Klingon Opera, it will still not be the first. I'll never again have the feeling of watching those beautiful trailers with X-Wings and TIE-Fighters for the first time. So, disappointment or not, the trailers and opening scrawl made everything worth it entirely on their own.

And then something weird happened. The movie was not disappointing me. The opening scrawl was perfect. “Luke Skywalker has vanished.” Bang. The early scenes focused on what Star Wars has always been about: backwoods, middle-of-nowhere, almost forgotten areas of the galaxy. Star Wars isn’t about sprawling metropolises, even though we know that the galaxy has those. It’s a story about heroes from unlikely beginnings and unlikely places, where the rich and powerful never bothered to look.

Tatooine—err, I mean, Jakku—was a perfect nod back to the original movies. Bombed out Star Destroyer hulks and AT-AT carcasses, without explanation or context, gave a sense of the transformation of the original stories into myths for a new generation. Rey’s daily routine grounded us in the notion that her life was real and probably tedious and not conjured up out of thin air to provide the basis for a cool story. Though there were lots of characters to (re)-introduce, each one was given attention and detail, so the passage of time had actual weight to it. Against all odds, J.J. Abrams—he of the endless smash cuts, frenetic pacing, lens flares, and heavy-handed effects—actually had the feel of Star Wars down.

About halfway through the movie, everything was rolling. The old characters’ place in the universe made sense, and Han Solo’s wisecracks never go out of style. It wasn't quite clear where the story was headed, but that was a good thing. Abrams had said something about how he wanted to return the movies to emotional stories about characters, instead of intellectual explanations of massive social forces, like what (mostly) happened in the prequels. He was succeeding. Halfway through, I was starting to believe that I would exit the theater with all my dreams having come true. (And yes, Star Wars is way, way too important to me.)

Then the First Order blew up the “Republic” with a “Starkiller” and the movie was no longer perfect. Abrams’ inability to tell a story with a sense of time crept back in, as a million things happened at once, in numerous different star systems. Plus, the story stopped making any sense: why is there a Republic and a Resistance? Wait, is the Republic gone now? How do you blow up a Republic that stretches across the entire galaxy…? How did the First Order build an entire solar system-destroying weapon without anyone, umm, noticing? And how come the “Resistance” only started thinking about destroying this weapon now? Mightn’t they have tried a few days earlier and stopped the massacre of all those people on all those planets that were apparently important somehow though it is not clear how? Why does the entire military force opposed to the First Order apparently consist of ten X-Wings?

 

One of the great things about the Original Trilogy is that it left a lot of things unexplained, which gave a sense of breadth and depth to the universe. But there is a huge difference between declining to explain certain details and telling a story that is simply nonsensical. In its first half, The Force Awakens did the former, and it was awesome; in the second half, The Force Awakens dove toward the latter, and it was not awesome.  

Abrams’ need to rush everything particularly weakened what should have been the central moment of the movie. The Han death scene, though decent, should have been … better. It should have been less pre-ordained, less obvious, less catwalk-y. And it definitely should have been dwelt upon for longer than it takes to sum up Donald Trump’s policy positions. When the heroes return to Leia after the battle, there should have been at least a ten minute funeral. Instead, Leia kind of shrugs.

This is Han Solo. He has literally saved the galaxy on multiple occasions. His death deserved more.

And finally, the last scene, I just don’t understand. The story was complete. Imperfect and derivative of A New Hope though it was, the story was enjoyable, it was satisfying, and the next movie still had the biggest poker chip to play: the revelation of Luke Skywalker. The Force Awakens should have ended with Rey and Chewbacca going off to hunt for Luke, not find him. Why would you waste that moment?

Of course, it could be that it all works out. If Rian Johnson does turn Episode VIII into a worthy descendant of The Empire Strikes Back, most of the errors in The Force Awakens will be (basically) forgiven. As I’ve written before--and in fact, linked to before, in this very post--it was Empire, not, the original Star Wars, that made Darth Vader into Darth Vader and bestowed on the Original Trilogy every last bit of gravitas that it has. If Empire had stunk, I highly doubt anyone would remember A New Hope as anything more interesting than Jaws or E.T.—a momentary cultural phenomenon, but nothing that a 26-year-old who wasn’t even born at the time of its release would spend thousands of hours obsessing over.

(…way, way too much.)

So here’s to Rian Johnson. He hasn’t made a bad movie yet and he’s made at least one great one. If he parks Episode VIII, I’ll remember Episode VII as an imperfect but engrossing story that started us afresh and gave us another mid-trilogy masterpiece. Otherwise, The Force Awakens was a fleeting but unique moment of anticipation, anxiety, thrills, irrepressible smiling, and not-quite-but-almostism. Either way, I walked into the theater a jittery mess, and walked out a jittery mess, and it was awesome.

~Right Thumb~

Of Planes, Trains, Automobiles, and the Human Experience

The following is an editorial written by Left Thumb and printed in that noble, Shakespearean paragon of literary beauty that is his student newspaper. This is the original form of the article. What was actually printed was a bastardized truncation of Left Thumb's thought that removed all sublimity, humor, profundity and all other such qualities that are expected of Two Thumbs Sideways. The editors of said newspaper are now decidedly on Left Thumb's "bad side." *

Last week I had the opportunity to visit the city of Boston for a couple of nights. The cause for this visit really doesn’t matter, because I have very little to say about what I did there or what the city is like. Instead, I’ve been thinking a lot about how I got there and how I got around the city. In the course of this trip, I drove my own car to and from Dayton International Airport, flew on four separate airplanes, took various shuttle buses at my connecting airports, and used Boston’s subway system several times.

OK, so what? All of this is about as unusual as an explosion in a Michael Bay movie. Transportation is something we use every day. It’s boring, pedestrian, like brushing one’s teeth or making breakfast.

Or is it? How often do we actually stop to think about how we get around and what it might say about us, either individually or collectively? If I myself am any indication, the answer is almost never.

Driving in a car is often unavoidable, particularly in cities in the Midwest. And indeed I do enjoy the simple pleasure of driving. But isn’t there something about driving a car that can promote self-centeredness, if we are not careful? What matters is only our destination. We choose our own path. We boil with rage when traffic slows us down, or when another driver cuts us off. Again—driving is necessary, and I do it as often as anyone else. But my visit to Boston, a city with an extensive public transportation system, prompted me to think more carefully about the way I get from Point A to Point B.

It is often argued that public transportation is the most efficient and responsible way of getting around. Fewer carbon emissions and a more economical use of resources are often cited in this regard. While these are certainly worthy reasons, I would offer an additional, less tangible benefit to public transit. Taking a bus or subway through a city can shake us from complacent, privileged individualism and allow us to enter into the very lifeblood of our community.

Public transit forces us into a situation where our choices are limited. We cannot choose when the train arrives. We cannot choose our exact path and our exact destination. And perhaps most importantly, we cannot choose what kinds of people travel with us, who sits down next to us and who gets off at our stop. The rest of the day we may play at being rugged individualists, masters of our own destinies, but for this brief period we must sit and wait with everyone else. We actually become part of “everyone else.”

There’s no doubt that this can be alienating. Traveling alone on a New York City subway, for example, can be an exceedingly lonely experience—I am but one among millions. But isn’t this a realization that is worth having every now and then? We recognize that our own lives do not constitute the sum total of reality, and that we live in an enormous human community that does not simply answer to our own private desires. Rather, we are in large part answerable to that community.

Indeed, I think public transit represents a way of truly getting to know one’s fellow human beings. Even without direct conversation, the mere exposure to people from all walks of life—excepting perhaps corporate CEOs in their posh limos, but who cares about them?—can go a long way towards broadening our horizons. We see a cross-section of the diversity that forms our individual communities. A bus ride in Boston is completely different from one in Chicago, which is completely different from one in Berlin.

The point here is not to feel guilty about driving. The point here is certainly not that we are all hopelessly self-centered, nasty, no-good people. I will leave those items to other commentators. My point is this:  maybe it is worth stopping to think about these everyday things that we do, and what they might say about our basic assumptions in life. Maybe, just maybe, it’s worth realizing that the world does not revolve around us. Whether you travel by plane, train, boat, car, horse, spaceship, or unicycle, that’s an important thing to recognize.

> Left Thumb <

* As RT could tell you, that is a very, very bad place to be.**

** RT note: I didn't actually say that. LT is just trying to make himself sound intimidating.