J.J. Fuckin Abrams

      If they never make another Star Wars movie that's fine with me.  I don't care one way or the other.  Will I watch a tenth Star Wars, or an eleventh?  Yes, but I won't pay to see them.  I've seen the seventh, eighth and ninth episodes on DVDs borrowed from my local library.  Otherwise I would've had to have spent up to thirty dollars paying a company that used to make quality entertainment, Disney, a corporation employing for its Star Wars projects a Spielberg producer named Kathleen Kennedy.  

     Kathleen Kennedy would be a good fit for the Star Wars movie franchise if she gave a shit about it.  In true Hollywood liberal politically correct style, Kennedy has transformed the most beloved series of space   epics in cinema history into preposterous CGI-heavy extravaganzas featuring unbelievable characters (Rey the exemplar of the incredible), as well as flabby, murky plots, hosts of forgettable charisma-free minor characters, and dialogue and asides that are pointless and wasteful of screen time because humorless.

     An egregious example of a poorly executed and tasteless scene in Episode IX, disrespecting a classic Star Wars character, C-3PO--the talkative protocol droid modeled on the beautiful golden robot in Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927)--struck me as hollow, cynical, and shameful.  

     C-3PO can interpret a vital Sith language text but doing so will wipe his memory, essentially making him an amnesiac.  Doesn't sound like a nice thing to experience, right?  Your companion is about to do something for the sake of the many over the one, be a hero, and what do you do if you're not a dick?  You try to make the necessary hurt caused to your companion come across as something you're grateful for.

Instead, C-3PO's companions treat his impending amnesia glibly, not showing they actually feel concern about the droid's impending mind assault.  C-3PO's following scenes throughout the film's remainder are played for comedy as he acts the part of an amnesiac, the screenwriters playing it for laughs, because brain damage is so funny, right?  Especially when it happens to someone you've known and worked with for a long time.

     It's good to see R2-D2, C-3PO, Chewie, Han Solo, Lando Calrissian, but it's disconcerting to see Princess Leia--played by dead Carrie Fisher but resurrected via CGI--just as it's dissatisfying to see Mark Hamill as Luke Skywalker, dead, glowing blue, offering advice to the miraculous Rey (Daisy Ridley), after the second film in this trilogy wasted the opportunity to have Luke, logically, act as Rey's mentor and trainer.  Instead, in the spirit of woman power or something, the non-Jedi Knight, Princess Leia, trains Ridley in a series of quick scenes showing Ridley acting out of frustration and anger more often than not--meaning she's not ready--as she's psionically affected by Kylo Ren, who is also Ben, son of Leia and Han Solo.  

     Ren (Adam Driver) is less eaten up with rage in this film, thank goodness, unlike in the previous two entries.  Post-Suzan Alexander's departure-Charles Foster Kane, but with a light saber, Kylo Ren has "anger issues."  He lacks the cold-bloodedness of a political leader or top military commander.  He's a space boy in a dumb black helmet, broken in the previous film, pieced back together now, red welding lines showing but looking like a three year old painted jagged lines on it.  It's his favorite I guess, he wants to wear something that looks like a baboon's dirty asshole.  He tries to emulate his shitty grandfather, Darth Vader, but he's no Darth Vader, just a petulant violent prick with mind control and translocation abilities.  

     This latter talent surprised me.  Kylo Ren transports a necklace worn by Rey many light years away into his hand instantaneously.  If he can do that, why doesn't he take her light saber, too?  Or her head?

     Just wait till later, for it turns out that, just as in The Return of the Jedi with Vader trying to turn Luke to the Dark Side, Ren doesn't want to kill Rey, but seeks her as his companion in co-rule of the galaxy.

     We get a brief glimpse of Rey's temptation to the Dark Side.  All of a sudden she's interesting.  she opens a fight with herself, shades of Luke's duel with himself in a dream in The Empire Strikes Back (come up with some new ideas, J.J. Abrams).  The evil Rey fights with a double light saber, has a nasty look on her face, wears a cloak and hood like Emperor Palpatine, who's somehow back from a commonly believed-in death.  Evil Rey and Good Rey go at it in Rey's vision, a brief glimpse of where the film franchise could have gone, setting up Episode 10, with Evil Rey having triumphed over the Good, now the main villain to face, filled with all Sith knowledge and whatever other icky sorcerous weird shit they're into, all inside one slightly built chick who looks like she's fifteen.  

     Rey's physical build has never convinced me she's capable of fighting as well as Achilles or any other hero.  But just say "Force," and my concern about this should go away magically.  Fuck that.  She looks like a teenaged girl who weighs ninety-six pounds.  Lucy Lawless as Xena had the build, the look, and the physically intimidating presence to be convincing as a sword fighter.  Surely Abrams, Kennedy, and whoever else helped create Rey, could've applied the same idea used for Xena to a character who's supposed to fight, grow, learn, be humbled, overcome obstacles, suffer defeats, but triumph in the end, maybe at great cost, which is why I wanted Rey to remain dead at the end.  That would be sacrifice, as she could then join Ben in the spirit world of the Light Side of the Force, acting as future guides to the next generation of heroes.  

     Another possibility I wanted to see...

     I knew Rey wouldn't turn evil, but my desire for subverting the film's intention of good triumphing in the end stems from not giving a shit about most of the characters, and worse, not finding any of them interesting except for the classic group, along with General Pryde, battle commander of the Final Order Fleet.  Played by a good actor, Richard E. Grant, Pryde (I guess the names General Avarice and General Envy were taken) portrays effectively a middleman-type functionary commanding a ridiculously powerful military machine capable of annihilating planets, each destroyer equipped with a Death Star-type laser cannon.  Ruthless, incapable of imagining defeat, Pryde commands the flagship of a navy so huge it fills the sky of the planet where it was constructed.  

     Abrams went apeshit depicting the size of this fleet.  It's so monstrously huge one can't even see the end of it, each battlewagon equipped with planet-killing weapons.  How many planets are they planning on blowing up?  How did the Final Order construct this fleet without word getting out about the behemoth nature of it?  Could they have gotten away with creating just five of these planet-destroying ships?

     The sight of a thousand or more Death Star-effective ships in the sky, I guess, is it's own justification in the mind of J.J. Abrams, even when it looks fucking stupid.  After most of these ships plummet to the planet's surface, causing untold and not shown mega-damage to a world's ecosystem (a dumb film like Independence Day at least showed the tremendous damage wrought by crashed huge spaceships in that film's climactic battle scene), Abrams doesn't want to get detailed about the colossal scale of damage caused by this wreckage.

     Hundreds of thousands of people on all of those ships, probably.  Everybody among the Good Guys and Gals are happy, though, at the end, with a diverse crowd of many races and two lesbians kissing.  Sticking a final shiv in my guts, Abrams even shows two celebrating Ewoks, the teddy bear things that ruined The Return of the Jedi for me.

     J.J. Abrams also ruins Stormtroopers, the white-armored blaster-carrying helmeted men,

faceless robot-type human beings who've apparently been reduced to purely functional positions in an authoritarian state, acting as its soldiers, its cannon fodder.

     Remember in the first movies how Stormtroopers went down when they received blaster bolts?  Did they make any sounds inside their helmets?  No.

     In Star Wars: Episode IX--The Rise of Skywalker (2019), Stormtroopers take hits and go down, but also they grunt and groan as they get hit.  Every one of them when speaking has a higher register voice, too.  None of them sound menacing, or possessing of a neutral tone capable of giving commands or responding convincingly as members of a military hierarchy, as in the early films when one of them would occasionally say a line.

     It's sickening to watch as a director and an entertainment corporation spend minutes turning the Stormtroopers (the type of people who burned Luke Skywalker's aunt and uncle to a crisp) into comedy props, moaning inside their helmets in pinched-off high voices.  Who wanted to make the Stormtroopers ridiculous?  Kathleen Kennedy?  Abrams?  What was their motive in doing so?  Was Abrams seeking realism?  How loud really are the grunts and groans as they pass through their helmets?  Every moan from a blaster hit sounds as if it were recorded with a voice actor grunting into a naked microphone.  I found this action scene so distracting due to this conceit I began to feel contempt for Kennedy's and Abrams' creative choices, as well as Rian Johnson's in his direction of Episode VIII.

     After about ninety minutes (of a 141 minute film--god, when are editors going to make Hollywood films shorter?) I realized I had lost track of the plot.  Rey has to get to the Emperor, she's psionically fucked with by Kylo Ren.  Ren, that is, Ben, turns out to be a woos who can't do the pursuit of power thing so we have to wonder why he's spent three movies trying to do just that.  Leia dies, her CGI image looks weird and unsettling, C-3PO has to relearn all of his associations, that is, until R2-D2 zaps him with a memory injection, problem solved, so easy to do, just like everything Rey does, defeating even the Emperor by crossing light sabers (Luke's and Leia's), driving the Emperor back, feeling the first fear he's ever felt.  This scene, good for about five seconds, falters when Abrams has Daisy Ridley (Rey) take a stomping step forward, making her look suddenly like she's in a silent film comedy.  The Emperor crumbles into soggy Shredded Wheat.  After he falls to his death, Ben's spirit returns conveniently to bring Rey back to life.

     Kylo Jesus, I guess, gets the idea for this talent from Rey Jesus when she heals him after running him through with her light saber in their earlier duel.  

     There's so much to talk about with this movie, like how it blasted my brain with its disconnectedness.

The pacing is off at times when it needs to be tight, as when Rey duels Kylo Ren.  Within a minute of the duel's start, Abrams cuts to the Resistance planet, where characters talk about Rey and the others, hoping they're all right.  The scene robs tension and eliminates the rising pulse of what could've been a good action scene, but Abrams, I guess, thought it important to have the Resistance characters discuss their feelings.

     Never cut away from a light saber duel, idiots, unless it's for a good reason that advances the storyline, or provides an interesting, relevant, and contrasting parallel to the action scene.  The Resistance planet scene, smack dab in the middle of Ren and Rey's duel, has the cinematic fascination of a daytime talkshow.  What the fuck is the matter with you, J.J. Abrams?  

     Granted, it could be that Abrams worked under irritating and job-threatening pressures from Kathleen Kennedy, who seems to be incapable of giving the Star Wars saga the storytelling justice it deserves.  Killing off Luke Skywalker, a character that killed himself off by throwing his light saber into the sea, making him a resigned old man, rather than a strong figure ready to help Rey prepare for her upcoming tasks, was the greatest mistake of the entire Star Wars films, I through IX.  But then, Rey is perfect, everything comes to her naturally, just as it annoyingly does for the prepubescent Anakin Skywalker in The Phantom Menace, a better film actually than The Rise of Skywalker.

     Menace at least has a tighter plot, more comprehensible and less needlessly complicated by far than that of Rise.  Another view of the latter film would clarify much of my confusion, I'm sure, but during much of Rise I had no idea what was going on.  I would figure out reasons for character's motives,

movements and activities long after I should have.

     Murk mars the storytelling, there's too much shit going on and each scene doesn't give enough time for development of the story and characters.  Most Resistance characters are shit-talking snarks behaving like they're in a propaganda-thick World War Two era service comedy.  Abbott and Costello made several of those in the War years.  They're funny films made by professionals, they still hold up as what they essentially are: well-made, modestly budgeted good entertainment.  Episode IX, made by adults with adolescent minds, just oozes along from scene to scene, jumping from one part of the galaxy to another, offering slick imagery and CGI, Abrams's lens flare fetish, and supporting characters from the previous two films who've been reduced to consuming screen time saying worthless dialogue while reacting to each other's words and personalities, none of which are compelling. 

     I'm not suggesting Abrams is incapable of doing anything worthwhile in his cinematic and television

future.  I liked his two TV shows, Alias and Lost, and even thought a few good thoughts about his first Star Wars movie, Episode VII--The Force Awakens, but he needs to get away from this kind of shit and make something creative and original; something shorter, something far less expensive, something lacking the influence of a politically motivated liberal bullshitter named Kathleen Kennedy.

Vic Neptune