Friday 20 December 2019

The Star Wars Vaccine

I no longer care about Star Wars. I haven't watched anything related to it since The Force Remakes A New Hope (which I reviewed here and here). This feels increasingly like a blessed relief. I think back to being 13 years old and imagine what it would have been like to have been told, at that age, that there would be a new Star Wars film every year from then until kingdom come. My tiny head would have exploded. But it turns out that the burden of having to be interested in Star Wars is too much for the 38 year old me to bear.

I don't give a shit any more.

Looking back at my Star Wars-watching career, I think I can identify Attack of the Clones as a kind of innoculation. Watching that blight, that pestilence, that utter cow-pox of a film, was like an injection of a disease into my bloodstream that did not quite manage to kill me and left me forever after immune to the charms of the Star Wars smallpox. It scarred and maimed me, at least in psychic terms, but it made me also stronger. I can listen to the 21st Century Fox drum-beat and fanfare without feeling that shiver of excitement that I used to. Instead I hear only the gentle silence of an inner peace that whispers softly, "Keep you money in your wallet."

This is sad, too, of course. I suppose I never articulated this to myself at any point until...just now, really...but there were three pop-cultural artifacts from my childhood that I always expected to keep with me forever and pass on to my sons in due course. (My daughter will naturally only be permitted to watch and play with pink things, ponies, unicorns and dolphins.) They were Tolkien's ouevre, Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Wars. Star Wars has now fallen. Only two remain.


19 comments:

  1. I am absolutely still a super Star Wars fan. But I am only interested in the material up to 1998, plus a handfull of videogames from the early 2000s. I don't think that love will ever leave me.

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  2. You should be watching fan films. What some Fans are putting out is reminiscent of empire strikes back. It doesnt matter if they have peed all over starwars like a predator marking its territory.

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  3. The Mandalorian is decent enough.

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    1. I am prepared to believe it but even that whole Mandalorian thing is now tainted by association with Attack of the Clones...

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  4. I liked Rogue One. And of course the original 3, in their original versions. Other than that I don't care. Except maybe that I hate the overly detailed vastly expanded universe Star wars has become, it feels cramped & leaves little room for the imagination. There's too much canon.

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    1. Yeah, I liked George Lucas's original approach of having the characters make asides to things without explaining or showing them. You can mention something like "the clone wars" and have it just be background flavour.

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    2. Another vote for Brouge One here - Its like a star wars heist film, pleasantly isolated.

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  5. My interest dropped long ago. Probably when I saw RotJ and it was already feeling like they were out of ideas in the face of corporate sphincter tightening... SW had become serious business and no chances would be taken.
    The best Star Wars movie I've seen in decades was Guardians of the Galaxy.

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    1. I loved RotJ as a kid though. And I do think it provides a highly satisfactory conclusion to the series at the end.

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  6. I still remember when our dad made us watch the original trilogy on VHS. No digital remasters, Han shooting first, etc. Seems like another life (well, I was eight). And Luke's original adventure seems so weirdly... small, in comparison to these half-billion-dollar extravaganzas.

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    1. Yeah, the scale was much more human. That was part of its charm.

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  7. Star Wars died for me the moment EA acquired the license to produce games. Even when the prequels sucked, you at least had things like Battlefront, KOTOR, or Dark Forces in the IP. Now there's nothing to justify it.

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  8. How old is your son? I went to see SW9 chiefly because my kid wanted to (and I had hopes it would be good...sigh...) and he loved the movie. As a dad I want to facilitate what he likes, not what I think he should like; tried that a few times, it doesn't work out well at all. Truth is: Star Wars is a great movie series for kids. Adults, not so much.

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  9. Growing out of Star Wars is just something that happens at a certain point, right? I think for me it was the Corellian Trilogy. Reading "Ambush at Corellia," it just struck me, this was the same story over and over again, it was even more shallow than what was passing for Star Trek at the time (Voyager), and the next set of novels was either going to be really boring or really different (and lo and behold, what followed was that New Jedi Order dreck).

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  10. It's been said that the original Star Wars was to movies what The Beatles were to popular music: an out of the box global phenomenon. Critics called Star Wars the Sleeper of the Century. That is true. As I tell my sons, you had to be there. If you grew up after Star Wars, you can never get the impact that movie had on what you had come to expect in movies. Likewise, Star Wars mania didn't go away in a few months. It was alive and well when the first sequel was released in 1980. Like The Beatles, Star Wars was everywhere. Nonetheless, the first 'hit' to the reputation did come with the sequel. Hard to believe, but I remember many people upset about the dangling ending. The idea of a movie that demands a sequel was rather strange. Plus, many I knew and heard just didn't buy the 'Vader as Dad' bombshell, feeling it a cheap gimmick to attempt to invent hype in the hope of getting people to repeat the first phenomenon. I can still remember the discussions and how many thought it was, to use the term today, lame. But such is the problem with sequels. Empire Strikes back came to be well regarded, but following it, the 'mania' was never quite the same.

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  11. I had a similar reaction when I saw episode 7. I just thought "This is Ok, but its not for me. I am sure the kids of today will like it, but I am passed this point in life".

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