How Disney Ruined Star Wars III
Episode III - The Continued Quest for Cash
A long time ago, well actually, a week ago, it was a time of disquiet in the Star Wars galaxy. The Disney Empire has taken over our tale and only cares about the money that can be generated, not the legacy or integrity of the franchise. We were just about to discuss Disney's lazy writing, when we left last time. So let’s get to it.
Instead of Disney dipping into the vast pool of books, for ideas for the plot of Episode VII, they just re-worked Episode IV. The idealistic farm boy with eyes for adventure and the stars, becomes Rey, a junk collector with a strong desire to stay right where she is, and a hazy backstory. Like Luke, Rey discovers she has a mystical power that she doesn't know how to control but unlike Luke, she is much more powerful and able to pick up things quickly on her own. Where Luke doubted the Force, Rey seems to accept it right away, even though she doesn't know where it came from.
Han Solo acts like a even grumpier Ben Kenobi except he doesn’t know anything about the Force and is more of a father figure and BB-8 plays the R2-D2 part, since R2 is shutdown almost the entire movie.
Poe Dameron and Finn put together are kind of a Luke character minus the force, with Poe being the shoot first, ask questions later, adventurous side and Finn as the emotional side, put them together and you would be close to one complete character but separately, both leave something to be desired. Finn or Stormtrooper FN-2187 is an especially unbelievable character. The writers require the audience to believe that somehow, in his first action with the First Order, his conscience overcame a literal, lifetime of training and indoctrination, causing him to desert his squad and defect to the Resistance. This is someone who was raised since he was a baby, by the First Order and given nightly regimens of subliminal indoctrination and propaganda. To strip even more humanity from him, he was called by a number rather than a name but in his first action, he just throws it out the window, there isn't a sequence of events where his faith in the justness of the First Order and their ideas waivers and he questions their motives. No, All that conditioning and he never even fires his blaster. Why? Because it needs to happen for the story. the story of Han’s journey from amoral smuggler to hero becomes Finn’s transformation from servant of the First Order to reluctant Resistance member to real hero. Except there wasn’t a real journey, in his first scene he rejects evil, right away. Wouldn’t it have be better if FN-2187 had participated is the massacre that opened the movie and lead the hunt for Rey, maybe kill a couple of innocent creatures, then have his conversion. That would have been a much more believable, more exciting and a better story too.
The writers were so lazy they couldn’t even make up a new planet. They just came up with a another backwater desert planet, called Jakku, which is really just Tatooine with another name. I think it might even have had two suns. Was it really important to have it be a desert planet? I doubt it, the writers just couldn’t be bothered to think up something else. Heck, they could have just switched Takodana, the planet where Maz Kanata’s castle is, and Jakku, although Maz’s castle is already the Episode VII version of the Mos Eisley cantina so putting it on a desert planet might have bene too much even for these writers. Even if they would have made it an earth-like planet it would have been better. I wouldn’t have been so preoccupied with the Tatooine comparisons.
The super weapon in Episode VII is just a reworked bigger version of the Death Stars. However, the writers must have thought that the Resistance and the New Republic are inept or don’t have any kind of intelligence gathering capabilities because they are very surprised by the Starkiller Base. The Rebellion learned about both Death Stars with limited resources and a less than ideal situation to work with, but the Resistance just stumbled on it accidentally and you never know if the New Republic even knew about the base until it was too late.
In still another level of laziness the Disney writers couldn't think up a different way to destroy the Starkiller Base? I can just see the writers meeting. Hey, how are we going to destroy this thing? A few suggestions are made but don't really work. It’s getting near the end of the day and everyone wants to go home. Then someone shouts “How did they do it in the other movies?”. After an explanation everyone says, “What’s the old saying? If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. “Yeah let’s do that again, so we can go home”. So, what they ended up with as a way to destroy the base would be very familiar to Wedge Antilles and Lando Calrissian, destroy something that will cause a power spike and a chain reaction explosion will destroy the base.
On the political front, the Rebellion becomes the Resistance and there is also an ill-defined New Republic out there somewhere, doing something, that is never explained. The dynamic between the three entities is never explored, so when, what we are led to believe, is the entire New Republic, is destroyed by the bad guys, you don’t care.
Speaking of Episode VII bad guys, the Empire is replaced by the ill-defined First Order. Are they a remnant of the Empire or are they some, Empire wannabe that is trying to pick up where they left off? Then there's the “mysterious” First Order's head, Supreme Leader Snoke. Really, Snoke is the name that they came up with? That's what they thought would be a memorable name that would bring fear to everyone's heart? Not even close, it's a laughable name! Besides, where did he come from, why is he strong in the Force and is he responsible for the creation of the First Order?
His front line commander is General Hux, certainly nothing memorable there. We have the aforementioned Captain Phasma, but as I said before, the writers wasted her character. The only bad guy with any kind of presence is Kylo Ren (playing the Darth Vader part) but of course he is one of the two main characters. Unfortunately he is written as the most sullen, self-possessed, immature child in the entire galaxy, not scary or intimidating just a kid in a mask who thinks killing his dad will help him become as evil as his grandfather. Professional writers should absolutely know, that the key to a great movie is to have the worst bad guys for the best good guys to play off of and be compared to, it make both characters better.
There are a plenty of other ideas or plot points the writers hoped the movie-goer would buy, or at least let slip by.
First there’s the odyssey of the blue lightsaber, the one given to Luke by Ben Kenobi. How did it survive Luke's duel with Darth Vader in Cloud City? If you can't recall, the lightsaber fell into oblivion along with Luke's right hand after being his dad cut off his hand. The odds that it didn't break when it landed at the bottom of that shaft are pretty slim, not to mention, the garbage disposal would have dumped it into the atmosphere of Bespin when it hit the bottom. Then somehow 30 years later it magically appears in Maz Kanata’s castle for Rey to find, without any explanation as to how it got there. The long journey of the blue lightsaber is unbelievable to the point of being at the Deus Ex Machina level. If you’re not familiar with that term it means “god out of the machine" it is a plot device whereby a seemingly unsolvable problem in a story is suddenly and abruptly resolved by an unexpected and unlikely occurrence. Its function is used to resolve an otherwise irresolvable plot situation. The writers need to get Rey the lightsaber and they couldn’t think up a better way than this.
Another outrageous plot point is the fact that Han Solo had not been with the Millennium Falcon for an extended period of time. Sure, it makes sense for Han to have lost it in some deal gone wrong or a card game, but he would have immediately started planning to steal it back. This also assumes that you buy the fact that he left The Republic/Resistance to go back to smuggling to begin with, and that assumes that you buy the idea that Han and Leia have separated.
A lot can happen in thirty years and it makes sense that things wouldn't be exactly the same as they were at the end of Return of the Jedi, but the reason why Han and Leia aren’t together seem muddled at best. It appears that Han left because Ben turned to the Dark Side, but wouldn't that push them closer? If not, wouldn't Han go on a mission to redeem Ben and do you really think that Leia would let him go on that mission alone? Instead, Han went back to smuggling and left Leia to battle the First Order and their son on her own. That's pretty cold. Not only is it cold, it just doesn't seem like Han. Even though he can be difficult, he has always loved Leia and it doesn't make sense that he'd abandon her like that, and what about Chewie? He may be Han's best friend but he is old and wise and has seen many things and usually seems to be the voice of reason for Han. He is also very protective of Leia. I don’t believe at all that Chewie would stand by and let Han and Leia destroy the life that they had worked so hard for and as we know one doesn’t want to upset a Wookie, and Chewie can be pretty persuasive when he wants to be.
Speaking of characters leaving, does It make sense for Luke to renounce his Jedi status, abandoned his sister, friends, and the Resistance to become a hermit on some hidden planet? His disappearance is so complete that in less than one human lifetime Luke gains mythical status. It should take far longer than thirty years for Luke’s exploits, like saving the ENTIRE galaxy, to fade away and become legend, so, why are Rey and Finn surprised that he's real?
Fine, he want to be left alone to rot in peace, then why does he go to the trouble of leaving a map to his location, splitting the map into two pieces and hiding one piece inside R2-D2. Perhaps it as an option for use only in a dire situation, but wasn't it already a dire situation with the First Order gaining control across the galaxy? Frankly, none of this makes sense and Luke just comes across as a jerk who wanted to play mind-games with his friends. Then, R2-D2, holder of half of the most important puzzle in the galaxy, shuts himself off and remained this way for the vast majority of the film's runtime. However, the Resistance gets a lucky break when R2 decided to wake up right when they needed him to, it wasn't for any particular reason, the plot just needed him to do so. It was such a manipulative and downright lazy decision on the part of the writers and the studio that it is beyond the pale.
Another mysterious plot point is Poe Dameron’s crash landing and his escape from Jakku. Dameron is referred to as "the best pilot in the Resistance" but after that escape act, he should be called the “Criss Angel of the Resistance”. Not only did he survive the crash landing, and somehow, the sinking sand, but he also got to a settlement where he was able to manage to get back to the Resistance. Given the fact that the Resistance is an underground force and the First Order is on the rise, it seems unlikely he would be able to find someone willing to help him and what about the risk to the Resistance itself. Their location has been revealed to an outsider who could sell them out to the First Order, but the writers needed him to get back for the story to move forward, so he just appears at the Resistance base. Frankly, there are just too many unlikely elements at play here.
Finally, the last plot point or device I want to mention, and maybe the worst one of all, is the unlikely way the writers end the climactic fight between Kylo Ren and Rey. We know that it can't end in the demise of either character because of their presence in the sequels, so there's no easy answer to this, but that why writers make the big bucks. As a writer an option you should probably avoid is to create a giant chasm to separate your two protagonists. Sure, the entire planet was imploding, but for a chasm to open up precisely between Rey and Kylo Ren feels pretty unlikely. In fact, it feels like the writers just drew a line between them. This is a perfect example of a Deus Ex Machina, like the blue lightsaber mentioned earlier. For a writer to use one is lazy, for there to be two in the same movie is irresponsible writing.
I think that’s it for today, it went a little longer than I thought but once I got going it was hard to stop. Next time I will go through Episodes VIII and IX and then tackle Rogue One and Solo. I hope you are enjoying these Star Wars rants I promise there won’t be many more then I’ll move on to something else.
If you don’t want to miss a thing from the mind of a Normal Midwestern Guy, leave a comment, or share this post, please click one of the buttons below.