First Post (Since That Which We Do Not Discuss)

 

For once, you don’t have to worry much about spoilers.  If you don’t know that Neil Armstrong (surprise!) lands on the Moon at the end, I’m not sure what to tell you.

 

I have heard but not confirmed that Flannery O’Connor was once asked what one of her stories “meant.”  She replied to the effect that if she could explain the meaning in a few sentences she wouldn’t have bothered writing the story.  This may be apocryphal or it may actually have been someone else who said it, but in any event, it speaks to a basic point that is true across art, and I think nowhere more accurately than in movies. They have the capacity to enter the soul in a different way, to provide experiences that explanation or description could never reach.  You might measure the quality of a work of art by its inability to be described.  Stanley Kubrick refused to explain what 2001: A Space Odyssey “meant,” because it was “meant” to have an effect that couldn't be described any other way.  That is, “you have to see it” is one of the best compliments you could give a movie.  (The best compliment, of course, would be Two Thumbs Sideways’ Stamp of Approval™, a thing we invented recently.  We’re accepting applications for logos and artwork and everything.  The worst insult, of course, would be to compare it to a work of Ayn Rand.)

 

With that background, I’ll point out the futility of this (brief) post:  I can’t describe First Man to you, so this post won’t have much to say about the movie, other than to say it is a movie in the best sense: it could only have been a movie, with sights, sounds, and silences that defy explanation.  (The first five minutes alone are worth the price of admission, especially in Imax.)

 

There is irony in that the story itself appears mostly concerned with the technical capabilities of mankind.  We bolted things together, calculated trajectories, tested things repeatedly, and reasoned our way to the Moon.  And the journey there wasn’t poetic—it was an outrageously dangerous, claustrophobic, bumpy ride.  The movie’s portrait of Neil Armstrong is such that you might think he had room only for hard work and calculation in his head, and it was men like these, with strong jaws and strong focus but little time for emotional or spiritual wonder, that made a Moon landing possible.  Waxing poetic is nice for poets, but rationalist engineers get stuff done. 

 

But that’s wrong.  First Man portrays Armstrong as a deeply internal human being, even to a fault, as he sometimes declines to engage with his family or friends when he should.  Nevertheless, he wants to go into space because the act of exploration teaches humanity things it cannot learn any other way.  You can describe how thin the atmosphere is, but until you have gone up and seen it, it will seem huge.  You can draw a picture of how far away the Moon actually is, but to most, it seems comfortably close in the night sky.  If Neil declines to give grand statements about what it “means” to him to be the first man on the moon, it isn’t because he doesn’t think it is important.  It’s because it is too important.  Humanity hit the jackpot in that the actual Neil Armstrong, the actual First Man, was a reserved figure.  No outsized personality could have done this event justice.   

 

The final arrival on the Moon is handled with a care that shows that Damien Chazelle understood this point.  For all of the sound and fury it took to get there, the surface of the Moon is mostly defined by silence.  No musical score, no visual flare, no ponderous symbolism could heighten the moment. Likewise, no prolix poetry can get this movie across.

 

You have to see First Man.  

 

~Right Thumb

The Last Blog Post, Part II (When I post again, I'll just pretend these titles never happened)

Luke Skywalker, Jedi Knight.

Last post, we discussed the endless list of ways that TLJ insults your intelligence and bungles basic Star Wars details, but we left Luke, Rey, and Kylo aside for the most part.  This time around, I explain how the movie should have worked, and why its treatment of Luke/Rey/Kylo—though it aimed higher and came much closer to Star Wars than the rest of this nonsensical crapfest—ultimately failed in devastating fashion, particularly its treatment of Luke, as even Mark Hamill could attest.  If I could have started from scratch, it would be better, but even keeping the basic structure of the movie, it could have been done right.

As with the opening crawl, the movie went wrong with Luke in the very first shot.  Here, though, TLJ got many of the trappings right, which makes its failure all the more disappointing.  It's like getting a tax-free Ferrari as a gift, only to find out that it has a Prius engine on the inside and a hyena in the back seat. [Unsatisfied with my analogy, Left Thumb adds that the hyena is laughing at you because he sold the Ferrari engine to the First Order.  He’s also wearing shades and a new gold chain collar with “RICH DOGG” in big bejeweled letters.]

 

If they had done it right, Rey would hand Luke the famous lightsaber, and, much as he does in the movie, he would toss it aside.  But he wouldn’t do so petulantly and then storm off like a moody 12-year-old who just saw their first crush kiss someone else.  Instead, he tosses it aside in a hearkening back to the very last act Luke performed in our view.  For those who forget, the last thing he did in ROTJ was cast aside his lightsaber rather than kill Darth Vader.  His opening scene could have been a poignant moment, recalling the lessons he had so painfully learned and displayed in the Original Trilogy.  Instead, Luke just comes off as a grump, and for all the wrong reasons.

 

It is fine that Luke did not want to train Rey, and it is tolerable that he has secluded himself on this distant island.  But it can't be because he thought about killing his nephew.  Luke is the ultimate idealist.  It was his idealism that let him succeed where even Obi-Wan and Yoda had failed.  Obi-Wan and Yoda thought that Vader had been lost forever.  They were too cynical, too worldly, in some sense, to see what Luke saw:  he could reach his father.  His radical act of sacrifice accomplished what no one else had foreseen.

 

That Luke Skywalker does not even think about killing his nephew.  Rian Johnson wants us to believe that the man who refused to kill Darth Vader was so terrified by an emo teenager's potential that he considered murder?  Killing Sith lords to usher in peace is an Anakin/Dooku or Mace/Palpatine move, not something that our hopelessly idealistic farmboy would entertain.  He would not suddenly revert back to the moral posture of the prequels.  Again, Disney and Co. are so short on ideas that instead of extending what has already been achieved, they wipe away the past and pretend that neither Luke nor anyone else learned anything or achieved anything.  The Empire is back and so is moral cynicism.

 

Instead, if he had done so, Luke would have retreated into obscurity because he was nervous about his own idealism.  He tries to erect the Jedi order again, only to have Ben Solo go astray and ruin it all, maybe because Luke asked too much, too soon.  Maybe he sent Ben to tangle with Snoke-the-Dried-Prune-Joke and Ben couldn't handle it.  Ben had not internalized the lessons of the past; he turned to ego and derring-do as the answer, which Snoke preyed upon and used to turn Ben against Luke.  Maybe Luke demanded too much, or maybe he didn't, but he feels responsible.  Luke is courageous and virtuous, but passing down those traits is a new challenge for him, and one that could realistically cause him to pause.

 

Worried that powerful Force-users are forever doomed to this type of temptation, worried that he can never adequately impress the lessons of calm, peace, and self-sacrifice onto the next generation, Luke retreats from the galaxy, hoping to protect others from his possible mistakes.  Not because he is afraid of Ben’s power (seriously? Luke is the most powerful man in the galaxy—for all we know, he might be the most powerful man in the history of the galaxy...), but because he doesn't know how to pass down the true Jedi way.  Maybe he should retreat like a Benedictine monk, avoiding the terrors of the material world—maybe the greater universe is too corrupting for almost everyone. 

 

Into this maelstrom comes Rey, and Luke sees the same potential for failure that he saw in Ben.  Rey comes hoping to discover a way save her friends, to win, to fix things.  Luke tosses aside the lightsaber and tries—haltingly, but not curmudgeonly—to explain that he can't give her what she wants.  Luke can even keep many of the same lines: he isn't going to stop the First Order with a laser sword, etc. 

 

Rey still has her telepathic conversations with Kylo, which were pretty great.  But Luke is unconvinced.  He sees that Rey wants to go save everyone, she wants to turn Kylo back to the good side and defeat Snoke, just like he once did with Vader.  But she doesn't understand how he did that.  He didn't do anything; he gave up control.  He gave himself for his friends and his father.  And he doesn't want to send Rey off to Snoke and Kylo because he sees it as the same mistake he made when he sent Ben off to Snoke—she isn’t ready, and she doesn’t understand.  There is ample dramatic ground for Luke to suffer and recall his past mistakes, like when he left Yoda on Dagobah without any notion of what he was doing. 

 

Rey is frustrated by Luke’s refusal to train her the way she hoped.  For Rey, this is about taking up the Legend and doing what Luke did.  It would have been nice if the stories had it wrong; if the popular conception, shared by Rey, was that Luke had triumphed over the Emperor in a titanic battle.  Again, we can save many of the same lines.  Luke can mourn the lionization of what he achieved; it wasn’t about heroism or adventure or lightsaber skills.  And maybe Rey sort of understands what he means, but not really; she is convinced she can do what he did, and off she travels to save the galaxy.  

 

But there's a problem.  She doesn’t understand.  She thought she could save Kylo because why couldn't she?   She thought she could persuade him, she thought she had some power over him.  But all she does is succeed in helping him destroy Snoke.  Snoke, by the way, should have been a tiny, unintimidating trickster, more along the lines of the monkey in C.S. Lewis's The Last Battle than a scion of dark side power.  He should seem weak and unimportant by comparison, relying on his deviousness and cleverness, not his force of will.  Rey thinks she is saving the galaxy by showing Kylo that Snoke is, in fact, a joke: but instead, Kylo kills Snoke only to take his place.  Rather than a pointless re-do of the ROTJ throne room sequence, Rey fails where Luke succeeded; Snoke is dead, sure, but he has been replaced by something more tragic and more dangerous.

 

This would all work even better if the First Order were, as it should have been, an upstart evil on the outer rim.  Rey wants to stop Snoke and save Kylo, but in doing so she unleashes Kylo, and only after Kylo ascends to power does the First Order go on a rampage.  Only after her failure does the First Order, through Kylo Ren’s power, begin to subjugate worlds and break Republic (or, if we must, Resistance...) battle fleets.  Rey has put all of them in danger.  

 

And so now, the great moral question of the Disney trilogy would be established: The prequels showed the folly of the Jedi, the Original Trilogy shows the triumph of self-gift, and the Disney trilogy would be about how to pass that lesson on.  How does one maintain faith, hope, and charity, from generation to generation?  How does one pass on that type of maturation?  How does one, in some sense, “evangelize” rather than proselytize, how does one exert some good will in the universe without turning back into the sclerotic Jedi order of old?  

 

If it had been set up like that, Luke's final exit might have been perfect.  The Poe/Finn/Rey/Leia contingent is about to be killed.  Rey is crushed and conflicted as she sees Kylo Ren reek devastation on her friends, beyond what Snoke had ever been capable of.  Hope seems lost.

 

Then Luke appears, one last time, to pass on his final lesson in the only way he knows how—giving himself up for his family and friends.  He doesn’t bring a “laser sword.”  He doesn’t try to “save” Kylo, and he doesn't use the might of the Force to bring the Walkers to their knees.  Instead, he says he is sorry, and he refuses to give in to what Kylo wants.  He not only refuses to fight, he refuses even to show up to the fight, in any meaningful sense.  He relies on Kylo’s own faults—his need for external validation, his need to prove himself, his need to seek vengeance on Luke—to prevent him from seeing the simple truth that Luke isn’t even really there.

 

With Luke holding off Kylo, Rey leads them all away.  And at some point, she has a shot at the kind of success she was seeking earlier.  Maybe the Falcon is in weapons-range of Kylo’s shuttle or something, I dunno, easy enough to create the necessary circumstance.  But rather than risk the lives and future of the Republic, she Force-skypes Kylo and says that she, too, is sorry for failing him, and she will see him again. 

 

Then, having seen Rey succeed where Ben had failed, Luke stares into the twin suns and the Skywalker theme plays.  And even though Rey is not a Skywalker, we cut back to her and she gets the theme music, too, because the Force isn’t truly about bloodlines or midichlorians; it depends on a continual act of self-gift, from friend to friend and generation to generation.  And the way to pass that on is not necessarily through training academies or genetically-advantageous marriages but by simply acting for others.  Having not only vanquished the Empire but now also extended the Jedi order, Luke passes away, and we fade to black. 

 

                           *                             *                                 *

 

No doubt, The Force Awakens got us started on a bad foot, and The Last Jedi was always going to have to solve some intractable problems.  But doing the above, making the First Order the bad guy rebellion, making Snoke a trickster rather than a Palpatine-stand-in, and completely redoing all of the non-Luke/Rey/Kylo stuff could have made this movie great.  To be sure, my above summary is rough and imperfect, but it took me a few hours to come up with that; Disney had multiple years to come up with this nonsense.  Whether due to monetary concerns, incompetence, or apathy, this trilogy is a massive missed opportunity.  It's going to make a gazillion dollars, so mission accomplished, Disney.  But no one will remember these movies fondly as paragons of modern mythmaking.  They will fade into the cultural obscurity of a middle-of-the-road Marvel movie or Pirates of the Caribbean.  They are not worthy of the Galaxy Far Far Away.

 

I’m Left Thumb and I approve this message.

 

Actually, more than just approve—reading Right Thumb’s alternative storyline in the middle of the night when I just ate too much cheesecake had more of an emotional impact on me than anything in the whole 150-odd minutes of The Last Jedi itself. Mostly, this whole debacle just makes me sad. As much as I petitioned Disney to get Right Thumb taken on as a screenwriter early in pre-production, I never got any response. I mean, I suppose a restraining order is technically a response, but that was just a misunderstanding.

 

I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I miss George Lucas so much. The Last Jedi is not his Star Wars, and it’s not mine either.

 

~Right Thumb~ and ~Left Thumb~

 

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~