Category: Films

Johnsonian Delusion

Johnsonian Delusion – a state of mind in which a person is completely unable to comprehend that someone else dislikes something because it is low quality, and in which a person will try to deny the very existence of opposing points of view.

I was recently watching a video by Star Wars Theory, in which he goes through an article that claims that anyone who dislikes Rey from Disney’s attempt at Star Wars films must be sexist.

The article isn’t really anything new. It’s filled with the same kind of resentful, spiteful, hands-covering-ears-shouting-i-can’t-hear-you-la-la-la non-thinking that we’ve seen ever since the release of The Last Jedi. 

The arguments that are presented in the article were refuted years ago by YouTube critics. There are hundreds upon hundreds – possibly thousands of videos showing why they are flawed. It has been discussed to death, yet there are still people, six years later, desperately trying to cover for the idiocies of Abrams and Johnson.

And this reminds me of something I noticed the day after I first went to see The Last Jedi all those years ago. I went to see the film one evening – when it finished I remember being very confused, because it seemed like the story hadn’t even properly started. Afterwards I spent many hours thinking about the film, and came to the conclusion that it was utterly dreadful. The next day, I talked to some people about it, expecting others to have observed what I observed (the film’s many errors). But to my surprise, not only did they say that they liked the film, they were fervorous about it. Immediately, without hesitation, they dismissed any notion that it might have flaws. They didn’t want to even accept the possibility of it.

It’s a phenomenon that I’ve noticed in lots of other people when it comes to The Last Jedi. A lot of the people who like it can’t just like it, they cannot accept any suggestion that it’s not a masterpiece. Some will reluctantly accept that the sequence on Canto Bight is a waste of time – but it’s hard to get them to even accept that. I had never known any film have this affect before – to instil almost cult-like adulation among some of its viewers. With most films, we all accept that some people will like them and some people won’t – but with The Last Jedi, a great many of its devout cannot accept that anyone dislikes it – it’s bizarre!

Even more to my surprise, it’s something I’ve seen increasingly for other films and television shows since the film’s release. I see the same attitude in people who like Star Trek Discovery, or Star Trek Picard, or Chibnall’s Doctor Who – a complete unwillingness to consider that maybe people have good reasons to dislike them. 

I’ve seen this effect so many times now – and here we are seeing it again with this article – that I find I have to put a name to it. And I think I’ll choose: Johnsonian Delusion – after the Great Destroyer himself, Rian Johnson, who not only inspired it in so many, but seemed to exhibit it for his own film. 

Johnsonian Delusion – a state of mind in which a person is completely unable to comprehend that someone else dislikes something because it is low quality, and in which a person will try to deny the very existence of opposing points of view.

Ricocheting between iconic and farcical – Red, White, & Royal Blue Review

I had no idea about this film when it was actually released – didn’t know it existed. I’ve only found out about it from the images and GIFs shared prolifically on social media in the months since its release. This suggests a somewhat underfunded marketing operation – given that I am probably the film’s target audience (gay, a royalist, and a big comedy fan).

I’ve been meaning to watch this film for the last few weeks, and now that I have (or am – I’ve actually started writing this with about ten minutes of the film left to go), I find the experience is utterly bizarre. This film violently ricochets between moments that could be iconic, and moments of such bad dialogue, such cultural ignorance, such TV-obsessed Californian idiocy that I almost stopped watching then and there.

The flaws in this film appear right from the outset in the form of utterly dreadful dialogue. And it’s all of the usual stuff we tend to see in bad dialogue: sentences that no real human would ever say, characters expositing their own psycho-analysis as the first line of a conversation, the writers using the actors as conduits for their Twitter-informed political beliefs, and gross TikTok slang spoken unironically as though it won’t horribly date the film in just six months. The most egregious example of that last one is Rachel Hilson’s character (whose name I couldn’t even guess) saying at 1 minute 37 seconds into the film ‘you’ve been yucking my yum all day’ – a phrase so unpleasant I think it could actually give someone IBS.

The bad dialogue appears right throughout the film, but about half the time it is compensated for by the skill of the actors. I have long said that a great actor can take even the worst-written dialogue and make it sound amazing (although perhaps sometimes only with a few spontaneous edits to it). In this regard, Nicholas Galitzine (who plays Prince Henry) and Rachel Hilson shine. (Hilson has had many years of experience fighting with unwieldy dialogue on Love, Victor – a show that is the unproclaimed king of unnatural dialogue.)

In fact, this is a film carried by its core cast, not by its writing. In this regard it is similar to Heartstopper, Love, Victor, and Love, Simon. (Why do so many recent gay romance films and television shows have this problem?) This film is mainly carried by the charisma of its two leads: Nicholas Galitzine and Taylor Zakhar Perez – with the former giving a really stand-out performance. Of course, this is the main requirement for a romance film or show – the two leads must have chemistry. Everything else can be a disaster, but as long as the two leads are convincing, the story will still be enjoyable. (I’ve said this of Heartstopper too – a disastrous, wholly unconvincing plot, but wholly convincing leads.)

The charisma of the leads is enough to keep me watching (indeed, glued to the screen for their scenes together), but it isn’t enough to stop me recoiling in horror every two minutes at everything else. The film has a multitude of basic errors in how British royalty works that betray a distinctly American misunderstanding of the concept. Without wishing to insult my American friends, it’s not that Americans can’t understand royalty, it’s that there seems to be something about American culture that puts them at a unique disadvantage when it comes to understanding it – both the traditions of it and the reasoning behind it. Americans seem to have a much greater hill to climb in order to understand it, and they often stop half-way up. This film gives the strong impression that the writers have learned most of what they know about British royalty from other films and television dramas, rather than from watching actual royal events or even just reading about it – actually being interested in it. It is a parody of royalty – more alike to the show The Windsors than it is to the real thing. The royal family and their assistants are portrayed as stuck-up fuddy-duddies whose social attitudes and beliefs are still Victorian. They are the epitome of the ultra-conservative arch-nemesis that I think nowadays might only exist in the minds of internet commentators. The film is also laced with condescension – an attitude of ‘Oh you silly Brits with your royalty! The American way is much better! You should be like us!’. It’s an insular attitude that reveals someone as having not thought about the subject for very long.

As I say, though, this film veers wildly between moments dominated by these errors and moments that could have made this film great. The casting of Stephen Fry as the fictional King James III was inspired – he should play kings more often. Unfortunately, his performance was ruined almost immediately by overly-verbose dialogue that was contradictory from one line to the next. His character exists not as a person with a personality, but simply as a megaphone for the misapprehensions of the writers. The character’s best moments are when he’s not speaking.

It’s a shame – this film could have been great – iconic. Its basic structure is sound – all of the things that take it down are things that could have been fixed on the day of filming with just a few seconds of thought.

I don’t often do star ratings, but I would give this film a 5 out of 10.

The Matrix Resurrections – Not Worth Watching

I said in a blog post last year that I was not sure whether I wanted to go and see The Matrix Resurrections. So many of these sequel/reboot-many-years-after-the-originals-but-with-the-same-actors films that Hollywood has chucked out in recent years have just been rubbish – why go and see another one?

In the end it was just curiosity.

I have a tendency to waffle on, so I’m going to start with my conclusion. If you haven’t seen this film yet, there’s no point seeing it. It’s not good. That’s not to say that there weren’t one or two nice moments – there were – but overall this is a confused mess of a film. The pacing is all over the place; it feels like it should be three films rather than one, but if it were three films, they’d probably be even less enjoyable. Its use of music, dialogue, and imagery are undistinctive, and not reminiscent of that of the originals. And it feels like a fan film more than a sequel.

That last point is the main one. This really felt like a fan film. This film undermined the consistency of the world of The Matrix – contradicting many established rules. Normally I would find that very annoying with a film (I did with The Last Jedi), but with this film I don’t. I think that’s partly because I was expecting this film not to be great, and to do something like that, but also because this film seemed so much like a fan film, that it simply doesn’t register with me as being part of the Matrix series.

There are many reasons why it seemed more like a fan film. One is just the aesthetic of the film – this film had a completely different aesthetic to the other three. The aesthetic of the first three films was very distinctive, and a big part of what made it iconic. The green tint of the computer-generated world of the Matrix, the monotonous architecture, the excessive orderliness of things in the background – all of these things gave the films a distinctive aesthetic. And it reinforced one of the key ideas in the film as well – that there is something wrong with this simulated reality, and you can tell that there is, but you can’t necessarily put it into words. There appears to have been no attempt to replicate this in The Matrix Resurrections, however. The Matrix of this film appears to be bright and colourful. It appears to have the same level of disorderliness as the real world.

The music of this film is completely undistinctive. Even immediately after watching the film, I couldn’t remember any of it. But even more than just being forgettable, I noticed, even as I was watching the film, that the music was not used to any great effect. It should be obvious to any filmmaker – particularly one as experienced as Lana Wachowski – that music can greatly heighten a scene if used correctly. The music of this film was generic, and added nothing to any scene.

And a third reason – a very big reason – why this film felt like a fan film was the dialogue. I think there were only four actors in this film who reprised their roles from previous films – Keanu Reeves as Neo, Carrie-Anne Moss as Trinity, Jada Pinkett Smith as Niobe, and Lambert Wilson as The Merovingian. For all four of them (although mainly for Neo and Trinity as they were on-screen much more than the other two), their dialogue seemed completely dissimilar in tone to what it was in the previous films. The most jarring example of this was at the end of the film, where Neo and Trinity confront the new Architect character (who apparently is called The Analyst – a nice reference but lacking in the dramatic weight of ‘The Architect’ (the character I think was also badly cast, and lacked the ‘unknowability’ of The Architect or the other machine characters from the original films). Neo’s and Trinity’s lines in this scene are sarcastic, banter-y, and quippy – entirely unlike how they spoke in the original films. It is a style of dialogue that plagues American films, and rarely works.

Dialogue like this – that is so unsuited to the characters – is often an identifying feature of fan fiction – where the writer just wants to have the characters play out the scenario in their head, having given little thought to whether the characters would do or say the things they are made to.

All of this is made worse by the film trying to be very meta. Now, I like things that get a bit meta – when done well, it can really enhance a film (see Deadpool). However, it can also backfire, and it did with this film.

At the start of the film, Neo is in a new Matrix, and he believes that ‘The Matrix’ was a world-famous computer game he developed. The games company that he works for has now decided that they are going to make a fourth game in this ‘Matrix’ game franchise. And various characters say all the same things that have been said about the original Matrix films and the possibility of there being a fourth film: The Matrix was original; it was different; it was philosophy, but exciting; it’s a metaphor for capitalism; it’s a metaphor for being transgender; it was about cool action scenes; it was about ‘bullet time’; a fourth one can’t be a reboot. There’s even the idea of the creator of the Matrix (in-in-universe Neo, out-of-universe the Wachowskis) not wanting to make another game/film in the series, but being forced to by the parent company or studio. They even name-drop Warner Bros. as the ones making them do a sequel in the film!

And I think the makers of this film thought it would be clever to put this in. But it actually just comes across as pre-empting criticism of the film, while also kind of being a dig at the studio. I think the makers of this film thought this would be clever because surely an even better Matrix simulation than the first one would be one where people could even be aware of the idea of a Matrix but still not perceive it. Because making a fourth Matrix film despite the original creators not wanting to is a form of control, similar to the Matrix simulation itself, and being meta is a way of referring to the Matrix that is our real world, where this system of control exists. It all sounds clever, but it just breaks the immersivity of the film.

The whole opening to the film is us seeing a new version of the opening to the original Matrix film. We follow it through some new characters, and the whole thing just feels like someone pointing at the original film and just going ‘Look! See! Wasn’t that cool!’. When the new Morpheus appears to Neo for the first time, he says the famous ‘At last.’ line, and then talks about how he wasn’t sure about the callback but that it was hard to resist. (He then makes a joke about the rather mundane setting – this film tries to be funny in places too and it REALLY doesn’t work.)

All these references back feel like the makers of the film trying to give the fans what they want, while also saying ‘fuck you’ to them. It’s like they’re saying ‘Fine. You want the same thing over and over again? Here you go!’

And there are SO. MANY. CLIPS. from the previous films. Every opportunity the film can find to put them in, it does. And this is just disastrous – the films spends A LOT of time reminding me of better films I could be watching. This has got to be the number one thing not to do in a film: don’t remind the audience that they could be watching something else.

The film feels like a ‘fuck you’ to the studio, who, presumably, forced the making of a sequel, a ‘fuck you’ to the fans, even though only a very small number of them actually wanted a sequel, and for shallow reasons. It feels like the makers of this film both hate it, but also think they did something very clever with it anyway.

The only points in the film that were interesting were where any world-building was attempted (which I consider to be an indictment of the people who think that world-building doesn’t matter – it was the only interesting thing in this film). Learning what happened after the events of the third film was interesting.

However, this was catastrophically undermined by much of that world-building making no sense, or leaving vast, unsatisfying gaps. It’s a nice idea that perhaps some of the machines came over to the human side, but … why? Why actually wasn’t there peace? Why did some of the machines remain at war? This idea goes no further than an aesthetic in the film – some cool-looking machines on the human side. If the Anomaleum, where Neo and Trinity are kept, is so vital to keeping this new Matrix running, why isn’t it more heavily guarded? Why aren’t there sentinels in the main chamber?

Why can’t Neo fly? He can later – what was stopping him? This is just dismissed as a joke in the film. He can now seemingly project force-fields with his hands, which he couldn’t do before (except for bullets) – why have his powers gone forwards in some ways but backwards in others? Why does Trinity also have ‘The One’ powers at the end? (This could be explained by the fact that it’s a new Matrix simulation, with different flaws to the last, resulting in two ‘The One’s, but this kind of undermines the unknowability of ‘The One’. There was previously this implication that no-one really knew why ‘The One’ existed in the first place – not even the architect – just that it was inevitable, and that the extent of his powers – which worked outside of the Matrix – were also unknown. He was described as being able to change whatever he wanted in the Matrix, but we never saw that in the original films – the most unusual thing he did was to fly. At the end of this film, they can literally do whatever they want with a Thanos snap.) Why does the new Architect have control over bullet time? And why does he lose that control at the end of the film?

The film has big pacing problems. We go from the Matrix being back to the new Architect being defeated in one film. One film reverses the ending of the last film, and then repeats it. Has doing that ever worked in a film?! The final sequence is played like a ‘heist’, cutting back and forth between the planning and the action, which is not at all what you want from a Matrix film, and certainly not for your big finale.

And the action scenes in the film are dreadful. The way martial arts are used in this film is undistinctive and forgettable. The way guns are used is undistinctive and forgettable.

The Merovingian comes back, but only for one scene. He doesn’t appear to move from one position, and I don’t recall him actually interacting with the other characters – his scenes might even not have been filmed in the same room as the other actors. He just shouts at Neo for a bit. What a waste.

So, all in all, there’s almost nothing to like about this film. It shouldn’t have been made. Its main redeeming quality is that it seems so unlike a Matrix film, that it’s easy to mentally discard it, and continue enjoying the original three.

Do I even want to go and see The Matrix Resurrections?

This week, the official trailer for The Matrix Resurrections – supposedly the fourth film in the Matrix series – was released, and despite really liking the Matrix trilogy (I’m one of what seems like a minority of people who like the second and third films), I find myself wandering whether I should even go and see this film at all.

In recent years, Hollywood has created a lot of sequels to films and series’ that had seemed to be over and complete many years or even decades ago: Disney’s attempt at a Star Wars trilogy, the new Jumanji films, the Jurassic World films, the Fantastic Beasts films, Independence Day: Resurgence, and more that I can’t remember.

Many (but not all) of these haven’t been very good, and some – like Disney’s Star Wars films – have been absolute garbage. (You’d think that, given how obsessed Hollywood seems to be with sequels, that they’d have gotten good at them by now.)

And at this point, I have very little trust in Hollywood that they can make a sequel to a film or series – particularly one that was made over a decade ago – that doesn’t just completely ruin the whole thing. This is no longer a per-franchise problem – it’s no longer ‘Oh well that sequel film wasn’t very good but sequel films for other franchises will probably still be great.’ – I think we’re at the point (well beyond the point, some would argue) where we just cannot trust Hollywood with any sequel to any film or series.

This problem does seem to be particularly prominent for films or series’ made over a decade ago. (Unbelievably, The Matrix Revolutions came out in 2003!) I think this is partly because filmmakers don’t want to imitate the style of older films (even though they could do so very easily) – either the style of storytelling or the technical style. This is one of the apprehensions I have about The Matrix 4 after seeing the trailer – it seems very apparent to me that they have not tried to reproduce the visual style of the original three films. This will make it very difficult for this film to sit alongside the other three.

But even more important than that, the ending of The Matrix Revolutions was conclusive – the end of a war – it doesn’t get much more conclusive than that. Continuing the story after that necessarily means that you either have to have a ‘quieter’ period within the world of the story, where the necessary world-building can happen to build up to a more dramatic time period, or you have to undo something about the previous ending. Hollywood always seems to go for the second option, which is the incorrect option, as it undermines the previous story, and any character development that happened in it. (This is the option that Disney went for with the Star Wars films, and it’s a big part of what killed the franchise.)

Based on the glimpses that we get from the trailer, it appears that the matrix is still running, and Neo and Trinity are somehow back inside it, despite both dying at the end of the last film. (Now, it’s generally not a good idea to try to work out the story of a film like this based on its trailer – the trailers are designed to confuse you as to what the actual story is – but this is what appears to be true.) While the conclusion to the last film was that the matrix would continue, but anyone who wanted out would be freed, it does look like something is going to be undone with this new film.

(Also, Laurence Fishburne is not returning for this film, despite the character of Morpheus being in it. I don’t know why this is – it’s possible that he simply didn’t want to. But Laurence Fishburne was iconic as Morpheus, and it really lowers my confidence in the film that he’s not in it.)

So I really don’t know if I want to go and see this film at all. It seems likely that this film is going to undo part of the ending of the previous films. That will in turn make this film unpopular, reducing the chances that a subsequent film or two are made to complete what will almost certainly be a new trilogy of films (because how can you follow a big trilogy of films with just one more film – surely you have to have another trilogy?). That will leave us with the original trilogy, plus one, maybe two more films that undermine the original trilogy, and which aren’t in themselves complete. It seems to me like this series is likely to end up a mess.

I will probably decide closer to the time whether I actually want to see it or not.

Dramatic Dissonance

In my reviews of Star Trek Picard, I’ve started using the term ‘dramatic dissonance’ to describe something that we’re seeing on-screen. This particular phenomenon or quality may already have a term to describe it – if it does, I don’t know what it is, so for now I’m going to use ‘dramatic dissonance’ (to mimic the phrase ‘dramatic irony’). And while I’ve started using this term in my Star Trek Picard reviews, it’s something I’ve seen in lots of other shows too – like Star Trek Discovery and recent Doctor Who – so I thought I’d write a blog post about it in order to define it more clearly.

Dramatic dissonance is when the reactions of the characters to each other, or to the events of the story, are different to the audience’s reaction to the characters or to the events of the story.

Here’s an example of this: one character says something, and several other characters around them consider it a very awkward thing to say, or a faux pas, but the audience doesn’t think that it’s an awkward thing to say.

Here’s another: one character does something (it could be anything), and all of the characters around them think that this character is a genius for doing it, but the audience isn’t impressed by it at all.

This second example is one we’ve seen a lot in both Star Trek Picard and Star Trek Discovery – in fact this second example is often a way of determining whether a character is a Mary Sue. (Other characters will just think that they’re brilliant no matter what they do.)

Dramatic dissonance is a bad quality for a show to have. It is, by its very definition, unrealistic, and if a show has it, the audience will sense something is amiss, even if they can’t quite put it into words. The audience can sense it because things in the show don’t seem to make sense.

I’m not sure I could exactly say what the origins of dramatic dissonance in a show actually are, but I don’t think it’s an acting problem – I think it comes from the writing. It may come from writers thinking too much about ‘How do I want this character to react?’ rather than ‘How would they react?’.

Star Wars Is Dead – Part 1: Fan fiction pretending to be a reboot pretending to be a finale

Okay, it’s taken me longer to get round to the first part of this series than I expected, but let’s go.

This film is a massive fuck you to The Last Jedi.

This film was filled with retcons. I was actually almost impressed with the number of retcons in this film. I was also amazed at the kind of retcons we got. Some of the retcons were of the kind we’re used to seeing, where something that was possible in a previous film is now just not possible, and next to no explanation is given. Some of the retcons were of a different kind – which I’ve been calling ‘narrative retcons’ (which may not be the best name), where the act of undoing or replacing something is woven into the narrative – this kind of retcon seemed to be used to change the direction and style set-up by The Last Jedi. I didn’t even realise such ‘narrative retcons’ were possible before watching this film.

Now, before I start going through all of the retcons in this film, I want to assert that all retcons are bad. Having retcons in your film or television series or book is always bad – having them always makes your creative work lower quality than if it did not have them. Because fundamentally, a retcon is a discontinuity. (‘Retcon’ is an abbreviation of ‘retroactive continuity’, and was originally used to describe when the creator of a creative work – whether they’re an author or a film director or a film producer – either added something into a sequel work, or said something outside of any of the creative works in the series, that changes the meaning, or the sequence of events, the history, or the underlying physics or metaphysics, seen by the audience in the creative work, so as not to contradict something that is seen in the sequel work. Retcons are an attempt at providing continuity across the series of works. Because of this we might naïvely see them as continuities, rather than discontinuities. But the very fact that we the audience have to change our understanding of a part of the original creative work, so that on second viewing of the series as a whole it appears to have a continuity, means that there IS a discontinuity in our understanding of the story. In short, a retcon asks the audience to pretend they didn’t notice a thing from the previous parts of the story. A retcon is an attempt at giving the story continuity at the expense of the continuity of the audience’s understanding. So it is a discontinuity. In addition to this, the overwhelming majority of retcons are imperfect, and in their attempt to remove an inconsistency in the story, they just end up creating one or more other inconsistencies – as was the case with this film.) Discontinuities pull the audience out of the story – whether it’s a book or a television series or a film, a discontinuity reminds the audience that the world of the creative work is not real. Discontinuities lessen the immersivity of a story – they are the antagonists of immersivity. (This is why world-building is such a big part of writing science fiction and fantasy – you’ve got to make the audience believe that the world they are reading about could be real. If there are inconsistencies in your world design, it makes your world less believable.) Every time I see a discontinuity in a film, I am reminded that I am sitting in a cinema. This is not what I want. In a science fiction or fantasy film (or quite frankly any film), I want to forget that the real world exists – for between one and a half and three hours I want to imagine that the world of the film is all that exists, and I imagine that this is what a lot of the fans of these films want. Thus, all retcons are bad.

This is why I said, in the video I made about Episode IX before it came out, that I thought there was no possibility of this film being a good film. It either had to go with what it had been given from The Last Jedi, which was shit (that’s for another rant), or it had to retcon lots of things from the previous films, which would also have been shit because retcons are always bad. Whatever this film did, it would end up being shit.

But okay, onto the actual retcons. The main thing to point out here is that this film retconned all of the big things introduced in The Last Jedi. I would have thought that anyone who liked The Last Jedi would have hated this film because of that.

Firstly, the obvious one: in The Last Jedi it’s revealed that Rey’s parents are not anyone of significance within the galaxy. It’s also implied that they weren’t Force-users. This was massively, massively retconned in The Rise Of Skywalker (fuck I hate that title). Not only were Rey’s parents not ‘nobody’, they were very much ‘somebody’ – in fact they were some of the somebodiest ‘somebodies’ in the entire galaxy, because Rey is a grandchild of Emperor Palpatine.

Now, I personally don’t dislike this idea (other than the fact that it is a retcon – I would have liked this had they done the proper setup for it, but they didn’t, and now it’s a mess), but for those people who did like The Last Jedi, this must be pretty annoying. Defenders of The Last Jedi often exclaimed that it was a good thing that Rey was not related to any of the big Force-using families – why did everyone have to be related to everyone in this galaxy? Why did Force powers have to be inherited? Are the defenders of The Last Jedi annoyed by this change?

I don’t dislike the idea of this – I think had they intended this to be the case from the beginning, I think it could have been done very well. But the execution is hot trash. In TROS, after Rey finds out that she’s the grandchild of Palpatine, Kylo Ren uses the ‘true from a certain point of view’ angle (it’s pretty lazy writing to just do that one again) to show how what he said in TLJ wasn’t technically wrong. This means that Kylo Ren knew who Rey’s parents were back in TLJ – so he lied … … but … why? What reason did he have for lying at that point? As far as I can tell, there is none. (Also, if indeed Kylo Ren did find this out in TLJ, his reaction to it was remarkably unsurprised. This shows again how retcons are bad – expressions given by actors in previous scenes now no longer make sense.)

The problems go further than this. This film tries to retroactively explain Rey’s astonishing Force powers by linking her to Palpatine. Of course, one of the main criticisms of Rey from the last two films is that she’s a Mary Sue – she can just use the Force very well despite having no training. Connecting Rey to Palpatine, and indicating that that’s where her extraordinary powers come from is an attempt to un-Mary-Sue-ify Rey. But Episode VII is called ‘The Force Awakens’, and the message from that film is very much that the Force has ‘awoken’ in Rey (something which they continue leaning into in TLJ). But if Rey’s powers are inherited from Palpatine, how did they awaken? She had them all along. This change undermines the premise of this trilogy.

Okay, secondly: Snoke. This is one of the retcons that I class as a narrative retcon. Snoke remains dead in this film – they didn’t undo that. But they did undo the big thing that was done in TLJ. In TLJ, the Big Bad, the final boss, was killed using a very unsubtle play on words. This was hailed as revolutionary by film aficionados. We all expected that Snoke was going to be killed off at the end of the third film – that’s how it always goes – that’s one of the tropes of these kinds of films. Shock, he dies in the second film.

This film didn’t bring Snoke back, but it did undo the effect of killing him off. Killing Snoke meant that there was no Big Bad for Episode IX. Except … in the end … there was – this film just decided to bring back Palpatine instead. One Big Bad had been killed off, so they just brought in another one instead. The effect of killing off the Big Bad was nullified.

So this is a ‘narrative retcon’. They didn’t just straight-up bring Snoke back, but they changed the narrative to put the overarching story back into the place that it would have been had Snoke’s death not happened.

But this retcon goes deeper than this, almost in a way that suggests J. J. Abrams was insulted by the killing-off of Snoke, because this film completely removes Snoke as a character from these films. Early on in TROS, when Kylo Ren goes to visit Sheev in hospital, we see a large tank in the dark room where they keep Palpy. In this tank, we see several Snoke bodies. This means that Sheev literally created Snoke. And when Sheev says ‘I am every voice you’ve ever heard.’ (something like that – it’s been a few weeks), he must either mean that Snoke was a real person but who was Palpatine’s puppet, or Snoke was just under the direct control of Palpatine, using some other new Force power. Either way, Snoke only existed for the purpose of swaying Kylo Ren, probably only existed for a few years, and had no free agency. He effectively didn’t exist. That’s quite a monumental retcon.

Thirdly, the Holdo Manoeuvre. This was a full-on retcon. It was also a fuck you to fans, because they actually had a character ask a question that they knew fans would ask if they didn’t do this retcon: ‘Why not just use the Holdo Manoeuvre against Sheev’s fleet?’.

The response to this, from Finn, was ‘That’s one in a million.’ (something like that). This is the laziest fucking writing I’ve ever seen. He might as well have just said ‘Nah’. The Last Jedi introduced something into the Star Wars universe that was world-breaking. The existence of this as a thing that can happen means that a large number of events should have turned out differently, if this is to be a consistent universe. And the explanation we’re given as to why this thing doesn’t happen all the time is essentially just ‘it doesn’t’, which isn’t a fucking reason at all.

I have never seen such lazy fucking writing – why do you bother making films at all if you can’t be bothered to think about these things?

Those were the three big things from The Last Jedi that were retconned, but there were lots of other retcons too.

The biggest retcon of the entire film, of course, is Palpatine. At the start of this film, Palpatine is not dead. He did not die at the end of Episode VI (or he died and came back to life – since we don’t know the details the distinction is somewhat arbitrary).

Now, even before this film came out, I said, as did many others, that bringing Palpatine back was not a good idea. Palpatine being alive means that he didn’t truly die in Episode VI, which undermines the plot of Episode VI. At the end of Return Of The Jedi, all of the main characters celebrate the destruction of the second Death Star and the death of Palpatine (and consequently the fall of the empire). But this is now a hollow victory, because they didn’t truly kill Palpatine at all. This film completely changes the context and tone of the ending to ROTJ – the characters may be celebrating, but now we the audience know that they should instead be looking for Palpatine, either to kill him properly or to prevent him from coming back. The characters celebrate, but we the audience do not.

No explanation is given for how Palpatine survived – in true J. J. Abrams fashion. All we get is a repeat of Palpatine’s earlier line: ‘The Dark Side is a path to many abilities that some would consider unnatural.’ While this is not an explanation, it does reveal another (partial) retcon. This means that Sidious used the Force to stay alive – he did not just happen to survive by natural means. In the Prequels, Sidious says that only Darth Plagueis knew of how to cheat death using the Dark Side of the Force. So apparently, Sidious figured it out on his own at some point between the Prequels and the Originals. That’s not impossible according to the Star Wars universe’s own rules, so it’s not a full-on retcon, but we the audience know that this is a recent change, rather than a fact of the universe that was intended all along, so it still sticks out.

The main side-effect of Sidious being alive is that it undermines the finality of death in these stories. This is a problem that can exist in any story that brings characters back from the dead – either by making that physically possible in the world of the story, or by pretending that they were never dead in the first place. This is advice that writers are often given. Tension and suspense are created in your story because the reader or viewer does not want the characters to fail or to lose or to die – the audience has investment in the characters. Bringing characters back to life in your story ultimately removes death as a possibility – after all, if one character can come back once, surely any character can come back any number of times. It removes the stakes, and thus undermines the tension. We no longer fear that our protagonist may die in their fight, because if they do they can just come back to life.

And this is a problem we see in this film too. Sidious dies again in this film, but is there anything to stop him coming back again? Will he just come back whenever the franchise is in trouble? Death can no longer be a permanent victory against evil – the protagonists cannot win.

More on character-based retcons: this film gave us General Pryde. This I think is by far the most interesting, and funniest, of the retcons in the film. One of the complaints about The Last Jedi was that it undermined General Hux as a threatening villain. Hux was used as a comedy character. This made it very difficult to use Hux as a true villain in TROS, because we wouldn’t have taken him seriously. I think J. J. Abrams knew this, and that’s why we got General Pryde, played by Richard E. Grant. General Pryde is just another menacing First Order commander – on paper he is no different to Hux – but because we haven’t seen him be the butt of jokes in TLJ, he can actually be menacing – we the audience take him seriously. Pryde is a replacement for Hux.

This is another ‘narrative retcon’. The existence of Pryde doesn’t contradict anything we’ve seen before, nor does it change the meaning of anything we’ve seen before, but it does reverse the effect of TLJ by giving us a new secondary villain. It seems two villains from the previous film were replaced: Snoke was replaced with Palpatine, and Hux was replaced with Pryde. We now have our new primary and secondary villains.

The existence of Pryde isn’t interesting just because it is this different kind of retcon, but also because in this film, General Pryde shoots and kills General Hux. This was amazing when I saw it in the cinema (not in a good way) – they actually had General Hux’s replacement shoot General Hux! The replacement killed off the original! As retcons go, that is bold.

They killed off Pryde at the end of the film. (I don’t know why – he could have been a good villain for future films – maybe he’ll come back from the dead too.) But I wonder if there’s a hidden meaning here. The Last Jedi made Hux an unusable character; in the end it was Pryde / pride that killed him, and then Pryde / pride dies. Is General Pryde a jab at Rian Johnson? Johnson has aggressively defended The Last Jedi on Twitter ever since it came out – he has, it seems, always been proud of the film. Is Abrams saying that it was Johnson’s pride that killed Hux, and in the end pride dies because TLJ was hated by a lot of fans? I’ve heard stranger fan theories, and it would explain why this new general is called Pryde of all things.

While I’m on The First Order, there was another retcon there, and in some ways this is the worst one. In this film it is revealed that Palpatine has got a huge fleet of ships on Exegol. This fleet is bigger and more powerful than any other ever seen at any other point in the Star Wars films. Every ship in it is both a Star Destroyer and a Death Star (I’ll come back to that issue later). This fleet is more powerful than The First Order fleet was even before the destruction of Starkiller Base (gosh that seems like a long time ago now), since every five ships of this fleet is essentially another Starkiller Base. This fleet is part of what’s called The Final Order.

But what’s confusing is that Snoke, who apparently created the First Order, was a literal creation of Palpatine. Everything Snoke is and was was given to him by Palpatine. So was the First Order just part of the Final Order all along? As far as I can remember they have the same uniform. And when Palpatine reveals his fleet, thereafter there appears to be no difference between the First Order and the Final Order. General Pryde somehow gets from a First Order ship onto a Final Order ship – we never see how, and no-one in-universe seems to question it, so apparently none of them see any difference between the two. The Knights of Ren (when they make an appearance) also apparently switch from the First Order to the Final without any confusion. As far as I can tell, the First Order and the Final Order are one single organisation.

And this makes me wonder: do the people in the First Order know that they’re part of the Final Order? Some of them must do, surely, but apparently not Kylo Ren, otherwise he’d’ve know that Sidious was alive since Episode VII. This is a massive great inconsistency right in the middle of the film.

Also, how on earth does the Final Order survive out there on Exegol? They appear to have thousands of enormous ships. I know some people have done calculations for how many people must be on those ships – I can’t remember what they’ve said, but it could easily be tens of thousands on each one. There are potentially tens of millions of people living out there on Exegol, waiting for Sidious to do whatever he’s going to do. How do they live? Exegol doesn’t look like a planet that produces much food. And are all of these people people that they’ve taken from other parts of the galaxy and brought to Exegol to be trained as Stormtroopers? Is this film telling me that Sidious and his gang were able to bring tens of millions of people to Exegol over the years, and no-one either followed them or tried to escape once there? No-one sent out a covert signal to the rest of the galaxy?

Also among the retcons were the Knights of Bloody Ren. They’re back … although actually, are they? Have we ever even seen them? I think we saw them in a flashback in TFA or TLJ – they didn’t really do anything – they just stood there, as far as I can remember. I think that’s all we’ve ever seen of them. And I think we only see them in two scenes in this film – once on Kylo Ren’s First Order ship, and then once on Exegol, fighting Kylo Ren. This is sort of a retcon, in that they’ve been retconned into existence after being conspicuously out of existence. I’d reckon they were included in this film just because fans would have questioned it if they weren’t, but their inclusion is just baffling. We still know nothing about them. We don’t know who they are or what they want. And we can’t figure out what they want here, because their decisions don’t seem to make any sense. In the previous two films we were given the sense that they were very loyal to Kylo Ren, even though we never saw them. In this film, apparently, even though I don’t know how they know that Kylo has changed sides, they somehow do, and instead decide to serve the Emperor – so apparently not that loyal to Kylo in the end. So in the end, the Knights of Ren were completely fucking pointless. We still don’t even know what ‘Ren’ means.

And then finally (yes, we’re finally there), there were some retcons to Luke and Leia. Leia was now a Jedi all along, apparently, which explains how she was able to train Rey, but is not sufficient for how she was able to survive in space without any kind of spacesuit. Luke was also made more Jedi-master-like in this film, perhaps in a direct response to fans.

Furthermore, as part of this film’s ‘fuck you’ to TLJ, when Rey throws her lightsaber into a fire, Luke catches it, and they have him say the line ‘The weapon of a Jedi deserves more respect.’ – that’s a direct response to fans hating it when Luke threw his lightsaber over his shoulder in TLJ.

I’m sure there are more retcons than that, but those are all the ones I wrote down. You see why now I’m having to write out my thoughts on this film over several blog posts and videos – this blog post is almost 4000 words long, and this is just the retcons in the film.

These retcons alone mean that this film is incoherent, and the Star Wars universe is broken. This is not a universe where things make sense. You cannot anticipate what characters might do, because it is not based on the things that have so far been possible in the universe, any reasonable approximation of realistic logistics, or previously established character traits and motivations. It all just happens. Any future films and television shows cannot receive any of the benefits of being part of a shared universe, because they aren’t – a shared universe depends on consistency.

If there had been no other problems with the film, the existence of all of these retcons alone would have made it a disastrous film. As it was, there were loads of other problems.

Star Wars Is Dead

Two days ago I went to see Star Wars Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker.

Now, for well over a year, my plan has been that after this film came out I would make a video on YouTube about it. As I said in my recent video Star Wars Episode IX: A Morbid Fascination, I thought it was very unlikely that this would be a good film, so I thought I was going to be making a single video about this film – mostly about what made it a bad film.

Now, this is a bad film, but now that I’ve watched it there’s so much to say about this film that I’ve realised I’m going to have to make multiple videos about it. If I tried to make one single video going over everything in the film that was bad, it could easily be two hours long. It often takes me an hour to record a fifteen-minute video – I don’t really want to spend eight hours trying to record a two-hour video – I think I’d die from the effort.

So I’m going to have to make several videos about it. In order to give some structure to the videos, I’m also going to write posts about it on here (the first of which is this) – a lot of the things in this film that were bad were bad in various different ways, so grouping them together into videos is going to be difficult, and I’m going to try to use these posts as a way of structuring the videos before making them.

But anyway, onto the actual film.

This film was a mess. It was a mess of retcons, deus ex machina, fake-out deaths, pacing problems, suspense problems, arbitrary nostalgia, and nihilism. It is just astonishing how much of this film was trash film-making, trash world-building, or trash story-telling. Things just happened – there was no reason for them to happen, no need for them to happen, and no meaning to them.

This film resorted to the most basic of fantasy tropes. I remember seeing in a headline for a review before the film came out, someone said that it had a ‘video-game plot’, and that was very true: a series of levels for the main characters to pass, a series of battles for them to win, all essentially disconnected from each other, before going on to fight the boss at the end. The film was stuffed with nostalgia and fan service – not necessarily bad things on their own – in fact many of these moments were quite good – but they were just disconnected moments, and they did not redeem the film as a whole, and often just seemed completely out-of-place.

This film tried to be a massive course-correction, but with only one film left in the trilogy, it was too late. Had they decided to make this a four-film series, or even a six-film series, they might have been able to do it. If they wanted to course-correct, then it was a bad decision to limit this series to only three films. Almost every decision they made in making this film was the wrong one. As much as I didn’t like The Last Jedi, this film would probably have been better if they’d continued in the direction that that film sent them – it still wouldn’t have been good – it would have just been not as bad.

I originally wanted to call this series (or rather the one video that it was supposed to be) ‘Star Wars Is Dead’ because I suspected that this film would be another outright disaster, like The Last Jedi, and that the franchise would be seen as no more special than, say, the DC film universe, or the X-Men film universe. It would just be another generic sci. fi. / fantasy film series with no greater status than any other. But while this film was an omnishambles, and while I think many of the fans of the franchise will abandon the franchise because of this film (those that didn’t leave after The Last Jedi, at least), I’m not sure whether the franchise will continue to have appeal for very casual viewers – it might, and if it does, perhaps Star Wars is just in a coma.

At the end of this series I’m going to return to this idea of whether Star Wars is dead, but first, we’ve got to go through this trash-fire of a film in detail.