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| Star Wars: Hope Strikes a Return |
This post contains spoilers of course but more importantly to uber-fans of the Star Wars everything...it's also not going to be something you'll want to hear.
I didn't love it.
What!? This movie has already made a gazillion dollars and is being heralded by millions as the truest representation of the zeitgeist of the original trilogy! A masterpiece for a new (2x) generation! How dare I disagree!?
Um, I'll go one further step in rubbing the salt into your wound...
I actually liked Episode I, The Phantom Menace better. Yep. The one with that little snot-nosed terrible child actor as Anakin, the supposedly cheesy CGI and, of course, the introduction of Jar Jar Binks. Yep, that one.
Here's why:
I wanted to like it. And, it didn't actually suck, but it just was like I was watching a rerun. It felt too familiar.
Let's break it down:
We see a small, funny, cute little robot with chirping noises. It soon gets tasked with a mission: avoid the evil space Nazi-looking forces and deliver this secret message to the valiant rebels.
We see Stormtroopers raiding a village looking for someone/something and shooting up the place.
We see an obvious bad guy all in black robes and cape with a helmet/mask being all impatient and commanding and shit. Time and again he acts like he's the leader of the idiot patrol and bursts out in fits of anger at his underlings' incompetence.
There's an old, stately white-bearded European respected actor playing the part of a simple village elder in brown robes protecting someone. He's killed by light saber.
Then there's a young enterprising individual dressed in white eking out a lonely, longing existence on a forgotten, backwards desert planet. By chance, this person and the little robot discover one another and a bond is forged.
Our mish-mash motley crew of heroes are on a quest. They go to a dark, out-of-the way bar on some distant planet filled with an array of all sorts of odd and interesting looking aliens. They meet an old, wise creature with very wrinkled skin and expressive eyes that is the de facto keeper of the flame so to speak. A forgotten artifact connected to an old legend are entombed here.
We see a disillusioned man breaking with the pack and wanting to be free and independent. He meets a rebel prisoner and forms a friendship with him and helps in that person's escape from the clutches of the evil bad guys.
This that and another thing happen but all in the context of the overall premise of escape/chase or search/yearn.
Big and little space ships: Pew Pew.
Big ass, really mo-fo bad spherical Master Weapon that can zap entire planets. Everybody now: Ohhh!
Estranged father and son meet in the midst of battle on a precipitous platform high up in the midst of a vast cylindrical abyss. One good, one evil. The encounter seems to bode poorly for the good guy.
More pew pew.
A countdown to the last seconds of when the Big Bad Weapon will kill the good guys. But just in the nick of time it's destroyed in a massive explosion caused by some really puny looking little spaceships about the size of my Chevy Spark. Pew Pew...BOOM! Must really have been all the pent up energy and surpressed gravity of an entire sun that was consumed by the weapon as fuel. Oh my fucking word, let's just throw every astrophysical fact we know out the fuckin' window why don't you, J.J.?! You fucking imploded the home planet of a noble race of beings in another movie with little logic based in scientific reality, why not this?! (Yes, J.J., je me souviens mother fucker...#remembervulcan)
Sorry, had to rant there at the end.
But, you see, this movie is just nothing more than a blend of the scenes and themes from the first three put together. So, yeah, I guess in that context it is true-er to the original trilogy than the prequels. But the prequels were what this wasn't...new movies. They had richer, more fleshed out and entirely original story lines. The visuals were, frankly, stunning. What's so bad about a shit ton of CG?
So overall, it wasn't bad. But I feel like I paid $15 to watch a re-release of a 35 year old movie.