Blackmoor Vituperative

My opinion of the Star Wars movies so far, ranked from best to worst. The ranking is not exact: any two adjacent movies could be swapped, depending on my mood.

Best
Star Wars (1977)

2nd Best
Star Wars 7: Episode 7 The Force Awakens (2015)

3rd Best
Star Wars 2: The Empire Strikes Back (1980)

4th Best
Star Wars 3: Return Of The Jedi (1983)

5th Best
Star Wars 10: Solo (2018)

Everything Wrong With Solo: A Star Wars Story

6th Worst
Star Wars 6: Episode 3 Revenge Of The Sith (2005)

Everything Wrong With Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith

5th Worst
Star Wars 5: Episode 2 Attack Of The Clones (2002)

Everything Wrong With Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones

4th Worst
Star Wars 4: Episode 1 The Phantom Menace (1999)

Star Wars: The Phantom Menace Review

3rd Worst
Star Wars 11: Episode 9 The Rise Of Skywalker (2019)

Everything Wrong With The Rise Of Skywalker

2nd Worst
Star Wars 8: Rogue One (2016)

Top 10 Worst Reasons You Liked Rogue One
Everything Wrong With Rogue One

Worst Ever
Star Wars 9: Episode 8 The Last Jedi (2017)

My own review of “The Last Jedi”
What Went Wrong At The Last Jedi Pitch Meeting
Everything That Went Wrong With The Last Jedi
Half in the Bag: The Last Last Jedi Review

So… “Star Wars 9: Episode 8 The Last Jedi” (2017). I thought it was slow and dull and pointless. More than anything, it’s disappointing. “Star Wars 7: Episode 7 The Force Awakens” (2015) was so much fun, with great pacing and appealing characters, and then to follow it with this long, dull, pointless… thing.

To save myself the effort of having to type this up more than once, I will list here the various things I disliked about “Star Wars 9: Episode 8 The Last Jedi” (2017):

1. Slapstick pratfalls and out-of-place comedy (I get it, comedy is hard).
2. Endless stultifying exposition.
3. Slow, awkward pacing: it’s like three or four slow, dull movies were shuffled together to make one longer, slower, duller movie.
4. Pod racing — I mean space horse racing.
5. Stuttering Benicio Del Toro.
6. Super Leia flying through space (I was literally stifling laughter in the theater during the Super Leia scene: I didn’t want to laugh out loud, I’m not a jerk, but that was just ridiculous).
7. Space hamsters.
8. Space manatee breast milk.
9. The Slowest Spaceship Chase In The Universe^TM.
10. A completely unnecessary and pointless Rose Teacup subplot. Was she supposed to be a romantic interest for Finn? She just doesn’t fit into the movie at all. If this were fan-fiction, she’d be the obvious “Mary Sue” character. Perhaps she is.
11. A completely unnecessary and pointless Laura Dern subplot. She was even more glaringly out of place than Rose Teacup.
12. Abrupt and meaningless Snoke death, tossing into the trash any tension or interest built up about him.
13. Abrupt and meaningless revelation about Rey’s parents, tossing into the trash any tension or interest built up about them.
14. Everything the good guys tried to do during the movie … every. single. thing. … failed. They succeeded at nothing.

That final criticism is the most damning one. Rey’s trip to find Luke Skywalker? Pointless. The Slowest Spaceship Chase In The Universe^TM? Pointless. The entire side trip to Planet Vegas? Pointless. The entire “take out the sensor” caper? Pointless. The fight against the Imperial walkers on Red Salt Planet? Pointless. It’s a three hour movie in which nothing happens, and we have no reason to care about any of it or anyone in it.

There is actually one character I care about: Rey. You can feel her frustration as she goes from scene to scene, trying to find a story arc or any purpose to this exercise, but never finding it. By the end of the movie, I felt great sympathy for her.

I suppose I should point out three things that I did not dislike.

1. I do not mind that Luke Skywalker made a tragic error in judgement, and that his error became the motivation for Ben Solo becoming a villain. That was probably the most interesting thing in the movie. I think it was handled badly — Luke would not stand over Ben with a lit lightsaber, that’s just stupid. But the core idea is interesting
2. I do not mind that the cast was a mixture of ethnicities and included both men and women. I have a hard time fathoming the mental state of someone who would object to that.
3. I do not mind that Rey has miraculously become an Ultimate Force Master^TM without any real training. Yes, it contradicts pretty much the entirety of what we have seen and been told about the Force and the Jedi… but who cares? We didn’t know about laser swords and mind tricks before we met Ben Kenobi. There’s a first time for everything.

Incidentally, I think I may be the only person who doesn’t like Phasma (the chrome storm trooper). It irks me that we are supposed to think she’s interesting even though she does nothing interesting. She’s like the Boba Fett of this, dropped into scenes for no apparent reason. The difference, of course, is that Boba Fett was used because he had developed a fan following, while Phasma is just a “collectable chrome variant” storm trooper. Just having a name and a different outfit doesn’t make her interesting. There are at least a dozen nameless characters throughout the Star Wars films who say and do more interesting things than what Phasma has said and done. I also think there’s something wrong with Phasma’s armor itself. I’m not sure if it doesn’t fit right, or if the actor has weird posture, or what, but it just looks …. weirdly “off”, like a jacket that has been buttoned up wrong. As far as I can tell, the only reason the character exists is to sell an action figure.

P.S. Do you like that gif? I made it. 🙂

P.P.S. I think people are trying way too hard to reinterpret this terrible movie in a way that makes it laudable. Yes, it’s lovely that the cast is a mixture of ethnicities and men and women: it’s still a long, dull movie in which nothing happens, no one matters, and all the good will and story potential generated by “The Force Awakens” is wasted.

But wait, there’s more…

This won’t make a huge amount of sense to you unless you have seen the “The Last Jedi” video Jenny Nicholson made, but I spent a long time writing it, so I want to preserve it. (Also, if you aren’t her patron, you should be: she’s brilliant and funny.)

10) Snoke was wasted. That he died is not the problem: the problem is that the audience’s time and investment in the character was thrown away. It wasn’t a clever misdirection — it was bad filmmaking.

9) I don’t care much about Kylo Ren one way or the other. He’s underwhelming as an antagonist, but he’s got some depth as a character, so it balances out.

8) The movie was pointless because nothing was accomplished. Everything the protagonists attempted failed, utterly. In fact, the protagonists would be better off if Poe Dameron and Finn had slept through the movie.

7) Again, that Rey’s parents are no one special is not the problem: the problem is that the audience’s time and investment in the character’s backstory was thrown away. There are probably dozens of ways a competent filmmaker could have revealed that and made the revelation mean something to the audience — this was not one of them. It was bad filmmaking.

6) I have no problem with Luke making a catastrophic mistake that winds up creating the next Dark Lord. That was probably one of the more interesting things in the movie. The execution was handled badly (Luke standing over Ben Solo with a lit lightsaber is just stupid), but in comparison with the rest of the movie, it almost looks competent in comparison.

5) Super Leia was laughable. I literally laughed in the theater. Let’s ignore the fact that it made Carrie Fisher’s final appearance (as a living person — I wouldn’t be surprised if she shows up later as a grotesque CGI mannequin) into a joke (the filmmakers didn’t know she had months left to live, after all). It makes what should have been a tragic, character-building moment for the protagonists into a pointless digression. She should have been given the hero’s death that her character has earned over the past 40 years. Instead, that was given to the utterly superfluous Laura Dern character. Again, this is just bad filmmaking.

4) As for Holdo, the Laura Dern character … her existence and everything she does undermines the arc of the movie and the importance of the protagonists: that character shouldn’t have even been in the movie. Again, this is just bad filmmaking.

3) Broom kid is irrelevant. The entire pointless trip to Planet Vegas accomplished nothing for the story arc or the characters. Again, this is just bad filmmaking.

2) “The theme of ‘The Last Jedi’ was failure”. The theme of failure is part of a good movie if the characters return from that failure and then succeed. (There is a literary term for this, but it slips my mind at the moment.) The problem (again) is not that characters failed. The problem is that those failures were meaningless — there was no follow-up where the characters come back and succeed. They don’t even learn anything. What did Finn learn: to never take risks to help anyone else, because it’s doomed to failure and will, at best, get a lot of people killed who wouldn’t have otherwise been killed? What did Poe learn: to follow orders without question? What did Rey learn: that nothing matters, no one can be trusted, and even the people who ought to know better will just disappoint you, so why even try? They all just fail, the end. Whether that was intentional or not (I rather think it was), this is just bad filmmaking. I will direct you to Jenny Nicholson’s brilliant criticism of Rogue One, where she says that intentionally making a movie bad does not make it a good movie: it’s still bad.

1) The movie didn’t “challenge” me. It bored me. I started looking at my watch during the pod race — I mean space horse race.

P.P.P.S. The Last Jedi is a Star Wars movie for people who don’t like Star Wars. Handful of individuals strike a decisive blow against a massive organization? Nope: the characters fail, utterly. Lightsaber fight? Nope: no lightsaber touches another lightsaber in the whole movie. Likeable characters? Nope: the movie goes out of its way to make the protagonists we loved in The Force Awakens into losers and incompetents. Dramatic death of a beloved character that ignites the resolve of the protagonists? Nope: Leia becomes a joke, a flying clown, an absurdity that will always be remembered as Carrie Fisher’s embarrassing final role. A character who made a tragic choice gets redemption? Nope: Luke betrays his student, does nothing useful, and then fades away.

Humanity’s love for authority figures is annoying. “Alien” (1979) gave us a perfect, self-sufficient, self-propagating alien species. “The perfect organism. Its structural perfection is matched only by its hostility.” So naturally a sequel introduced a superfluous “queen”. “Star Trek The Next Generation” gave us the Borg, a hive mind with no leaders, no individual thought: a society of perfect, remorseless unity. So naturally “Star Trek: First Contact” (1996) introduced another superfluous “queen”.

It’s like we can’t even conceive of a society without authority figures, even an alien one.

Recent movie viewing…

Ghost In The Shell (1995)

“Ghost In The Shell” is pretty famous, but I’d never seen it. The first half hour is really good. I really liked the story, the characters (if not the English-speaking voice actors), and the animation. It starts to bog down at around 30 minutes, when two characters woodenly recite some Philosophy 101 blather for a few minutes. After that, every ten minutes or so the movie grinds to a screeching halt for more “what does it mean to be alive” blah blah blah. It’s the sort of tedious philosophical crap that seems deep when you’re 16; after you take a couple of philosophy courses, or read a few books, or get some life experience… not so much. Aside from that, and the English voice actors in the dubbed version being really just terrible (don’t judge me for watching the dubbed version), I thought it was okay, but I expected it to be a lot better.

The Sand (2015)

In “The Sand”, a half-dozen attractive young people in bathing suits wake up after a beach party to find that they are stranded in the middle of a stretch of beach that eats anything living that touches it. The premise sounds horrendous, but the performances and the variety of ways the characters die really raise the quality of this. The cast is surprisingly good, and the movie held my interest the entire time. The special effects are very good at the beginning (both the gore and the monster), but get more cheesy and less convincing as the film goes on. But at the beginning, they really are quite good. Overall, this movie exceeded my expectations, and even surprised me a couple of times.

Nudist Colony Of The Dead (1991)

“Nudist Colony Of The Dead” sounds like it will be awful, and it is. However, it’s not what I expected, and it’s actually somewhat amusing. For one thing, it’s a musical. The songs are terrible, but the tunes are kind of catchy. Second, it’s a satire of late-1980s Americanized Christianity, along the lines of “Saved” (2004). It’s not as funny as “Saved”, but they do try, and it’s definitely a step above painfully unfunny “comedies” like “Bridesmaids” (2011), “Jack And Jill” (2011), and “Hot Pursuit” (2015). Finally, I was surprised at just how little nudity there is. I was expecting a cringe-inducing, wooden parade of naked bodies, but there’s more nudity on an episode of Game Of Thrones (the first season, anyway: I stopped watching shortly after Sean Bean died). Heck, “Ghost In The Shell” probably had as much nudity (although those were robots, so I’m not sure that counts). So while I wouldn’t call this a good movie, if your expectations are as low as mine were, you might find it okay, or even mildly amusing. But it’s no “Zombie Strippers” (which is fantastic, aside from the tedious framing scenes at the beginning and the end).

Tonight’s Cult Movie Night was “Interview With The Vampire” (1994) and “Queen Of The Damned” (2002). “Interview” is definitely the better film, but the cast in both is really quite good. And Aaliyah was just pure magic in “Queen”. She steals the movie, even though she only has a few scenes.

We watched a fun movie this evening: Bullet to The Head (2012), with Sylvester Stallone, Sung Kang, Sarah Shahi, and Jason Momoa. The villains in this movie, particularly Momoa, really made it worth watching. My only significant complaint about the Wonder Woman movie is that I wish it had better villains.

Speaking of the Wonder Woman movie, it’s really good, and you should see it. Gal Godot makes a great Wonder Woman, and the Amazonian cast was excellent. I also liked the small squad she was with in Belgium. I kind of wish there had been other women in that group, though (there easily could have been, without breaking historical authenticity). Baby steps, I guess. Overall, it was really quite good. I hope the Justice League movies follow this example.

From the files of… IT’S THE SAME GUY! We bring you the case of David Krumholtz and Oscar Isaac. We saw ONE of these men tonight playing a small part in a Seth Rogan comedy, This Is The End (2013). Which of them was it? YOU make the call!

We enjoyed Alien: Covenant. Horror movies should be rated “R” (if we must suffer under these infantile rating systems at all). I also learned several things from the Ridley Scott School Of Space Exploration.

• Embrace the weather! When landing on an alien planet, find the worst storm you can, and land in the middle of it. Why wait for the storm to end? You have a planet to explore!
• Take a walk! If there is a specific location on the alien world that you want to see, land five miles away from it, and walk there.
• Immerse yourself! Don’t use drones or remotely operated vehicles to explore. Pull on your space-galoshes and tromp around the alien biosphere.
• Breathe it in! Don’t wear a space helmet, or even a hard hat. Stop and smell the flowers (or alien fungus pods). Inhale deeply of the space exploration experience!

But we really did have fun. 🙂

Have I mentioned how much fun we had at Guardians Of The Galaxy 2? We really enjoyed it. I think it’s probably the funniest comedy I have seen in ages. Some of it was in-your-face and obvious, but some was pretty subtle, like how a character named Ego has life-size dioramas of scenes from his life in his house. Because of COURSE he does! I am laughing just thinking about it.

“And this was when I bought my first car. It was a blue 1973 Chevy Vega with a Kraco tape deck. The eject button was broken, so all it ever played was Prince’s ‘Purple Rain’ album.”

This arrived today: my swag from the “new” Mystery Science Theater 3000 Kickstarter. I am debating whether to keep them or sell them on Ebay. I am leaning toward selling them: they are a painful reminder of what could have been. “What could have been”, of course, is a new Mystery Science Theater that is actually good. Or at least, not utterly dreadful, which is what it is.

Utterly dreadful.

It needn’t have been dreadful. It could have been great. If they’d not edited the movies for time or content (they are actually shorter than the Comedy Central episodes!). If they’d not taken the lazy way out with the invention exchanges (I mean, seriously, why did they even bother). If the riffs were not being recited at double-speed like old-timey auctioneers. If the voice actors for Tom Servo and Crow didn’t sound indistinguishable from each other. If the lyrics of the opening theme didn’t jar egregiously with the melody, and if it didn’t pause inexplicably for ten seconds for no apparent reason (why? why??). If the three-person puppeteering of Tom and Crow wasn’t worse than the worst that Josh, Trace, Kevin, or Bill ever did. If the interior of the Satellite Of Love didn’t look like a cheap painted backdrop. If the Hexfield Viewscreen (TM) hadn’t been replaced with a simple screen that drops from the ceiling. If Gypsy hadn’t been attached to the ceiling for no apparent reason, limiting her movement and interactivity. If they hadn’t made Tom Servo’s arms stiff and even less articulate. And don’t get me started on the dysfunctional in-theater performances (flying stiff-armed Tom Servo, random Gypsy luggage-handling, lip-synced riffing… again: why??).

I could go on, and on, and on. Did I mention the completely unnecessary editing of the films? That, by itself, is enough reason to eschew this travesty.

And yet, I am glad I supported the Kickstarter. Because it might have been great — or at least good. It might have been worth what I — and hundreds of other people — spent money on. It might have been….

sigh

Update: I sold some, gave away the rest. It has been a relief not to have those reminders around. I sincerely hope that this is the last I hear of this fetid imitation.