2019-12-26

Thank you Disney and Hollywood for fucking up my childhood by ruining Star Wars.

Thank you for wrecking something I cherished ever since I was a small boy - Star Wars.

I first saw the very first one in a Montreal cinema when I was 5 years old. To this very day, the images of C3P0 and R2-D2 resonate in me; Darth Vader was both scary and cool, and I wanted to be Luke Skywalker. I wanted an older wiser friend in Han Solo, and of course,  I lusted over Princess Leia.

I am and remain forever grateful to my Dad for taking me and my older brother to see it.

And I grew up on the films that followed. I disliked Empire, because of how Luke ended up. I even at one point disliked Luke for being petty, petulant, rushing off to take on Vader, and so on.

I also watched as my fear of Vader gradually subsided and was able to see him as a father reaching out to his son, and that he really was a Slave to a bigger and more evil Master - namely the Emperor.

And while there was much to dislike about the Prequel Trilogy (Jar-Jar namely), I respected both the films, and for George Lucas in that he was passionate about telling the back story behind how Luke's father went from being a good person, to being evil - and eventually redeeming himself.

So now I see Disney has completely fucked that up - gee thanks.

They emasculated every man in their Sequel trilogy - both the ones that appeared in the original one, plus this one - and basically turned the story into a cross between a Disney Princess story, and a Twilight soap opera.

Rey isn't a character, but rather should be called Princess Mary Sue. She never does anything wrong, she never grew or matured, she never experienced adversity or challenges, she never learned anything, she never lost.

And on top of it all, she ended up stealing the Skywalker name; ripping it off from all the other Skywalkers who are now dead, and wearing it like a trophy skin. Quite like how Disney essentially treats Star Wars fans like me.

More on that here - https://cosmicbook.news/star-wars-rise-skywalker-review.

Could it have been done differently? Yes.

Yes - they could've essentially told the same story, but with one key change. They could've told the same story and been successful, if it had been told from the point of view of Kylo Ren/Ben Solo.

That's right - they should've made Kylo the protagonist, and Rey the antagonist. This is not to mean that one is good and one is bad, no. It just means that the story should've followed Kylo Ren instead.

That would've been a much more interesting story to tell - and it'd have had some fairly nice symmetry with the previous story. Instead of a story about a good person held back by their desires and eventually turning evil, it would've been about a bad person held back by their good side and eventually being redeemed. In that sense, the characters of Kylo and Rey could've remained more or less the same then. Rey could've been held up as what the Jedi could be and should be (even revealing the irony that it all comes her Dark Side connection to Sidious; which would've been an interesting character arc for her).

That's what I would've done. But that's also why I'm not in the movie business.




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