When I Get My Force Twisted

Now that we've all had a chance to calm down after seeing Star Wars: The Last Jedi, I think it's a good time to discuss one major aspect of the film's story. I'm not talking about a particular character or subplot, but rather a trend that was present all throughout the movie and has been pretty controversial in film for years. What is that topic?

Why, the utter refusal to bring podracing back into Star Wars, of course! What the heck, Disney? You have a scene set on a gambling racetrack and you give us some cliche animal rights message with puppy-eyed giraffe monsters instead of a podrace? I know you don't want to raise the spectre of the prequels too much, but come on! Just show a quick shot or two of a podrace, then have Finn and Rose hijack a podracer and fly it through the casino as a diversion so the slave children who were being abused can escape.

Actually, the trend I really want to discuss is plot twists that toy with viewer expectations -- which is sort of what my little rant there did, so I'll count it as staying on topic.

Writer/Director Rian Johnson has said in interviews that he wasn't aiming to subvert the fans' expectations in The Last Jedi, stating that doing so "would lead to some contrived places." He claims that everything that happens to Rey, Kylo Ren, Luke, Leia, and Snoke in the story is what felt like the most natural course to take with each character. I'm willing to believe him, especially after reading his explanation on Slashfilm.com for what happens with Kylo and Snoke:

"[...] Kylo’s arc in this movie, besides his relationship with Rey, I saw as the big arc for Kylo breaking down this kind of unstable foundation that he’s on and then building him to where by the end of the film he’s no longer just a Vader wannabe. But he’s stepped into his own as kind of a quote-unquote villain, but a complicated villain that you understand, right?  So with that in mind, the idea that Kylo would get to that place by the end of it led me to think, well, then what is Snoke’s place at the end?  And does that work with him just kneeling before Snoke at the end?  No.  If Kylo’s gotta get to a place of actual power the ultimate expression of that would be him ascending beyond his master.

And that also then gives the opportunity to have a great, dramatic moment that you don’t expect of getting Snoke kind of out of the way.  So that really is where it all stemmed from.  It was thinking about Kylo’s path, thinking about where I wanted him to be at the end of the movie to set him up for the next film.  And thinking okay, that means we’re gonna clear away this slightly more familiar dynamic of the Emperor and the pupil.  Clear the boards from that, and then that’s much more exciting going into [Episode IX], the notion of now we just have Kylo as the one that they have to deal with.  You can no longer take a rational guess at how the Snoke-Kylo thing is gonna play out in the next movie."

Still, after how much The Force Awakens borrowed from the original Star Wars, I doubt very much that Johnson never noticed any of the resemblances to The Empire Strikes Back or Return of the Jedi while writing this film. So many of the setups in The Last Jedi, such as Rey's attempt to sway Kylo to the light side during a showdown in Snoke's throne room, are so familiar that you'd swear Johnson started writing those scenes by copying and pasting the ones from the original trilogy screenplays. 

Maybe the studio pressured him to follow tropes of the series, or maybe he felt compelled to follow the precedent of The Force Awakens (which he didn't write) for consistency. Whatever the case, I'm not sure if it was totally his choice to have such derivative setups throughout his plot. Since those setups are so derivative though, it only stands to reason that their payoffs should be different this time around. That's not toying with viewer expectations so much as being a good screenwriter by avoiding redundancy.

What I find more questionable are the plot twists that Johnson put into the film's secondary storyline, the one that doesn't borrow so heavily from the previous films.

Here's the rundown: After Leia ends up in a coma, the command falls to a female admiral that the character Poe Dameron doesn't trust. Her plan against the villains seems suspicious, so he comes up with his own plan and sends Finn and Rose to find a master hacker who can bug the computer on the villains' main ship. They find the master hacker, but get arrested, then they happen to meet another, better hacker in jail who breaks them out. He hacks the villains' ship like they wanted, then he betrays them because he was actually working for the villains all along. Then Leia wakes up and knocks Poe unconscious when he tries to accuse the admiral of treason. Then he wakes up and learns that the admiral had a better plan all along that she and Leia were hiding to teach him a lesson about trusting authorities.

So basically, that entire subplot was irrelevant.

To be fair, I suspect this storyline was the result of Johnson being saddled with the supporting cast of The Force Awakens and not entirely knowing what to do with them. However, a part of me does still blame it on the trend that we're discussing today.

I'm probably not the first person to say this, but I'm starting to think The Sixth Sense is actually M. Night Shyamalan 's worst contribution to film -- in that its only lasting impact has been the notion that movies must contain big, surprising plot twists in order to be good. I know plot twists were a thing before that (a certain big reveal in a certain other Star Wars movie comes to mind) but The Sixth Sense seems to be the film that really made using them the trend that it is today. I know I'm not the only person who jokingly thought "What a twist!" in an Indian accent after seeing The Last Jedi.

And I mean it, practically every movie contains a twist now, whether it's revealing a surprise villain, revealing a character's secret identity or agenda, revealing a red herring, or most notoriously, revealing that it was all a dream. And you know what? The majority of those plot twists seem to just confuse or annoy audiences.

I think screenwriters need to view plot twists almost like a special effects budget: you only have so much use that you can get out of them, and if you want the quality to be top notch, then use them sparingly and make the story justify each use. Otherwise, you're likely to just cheapen them.

As for The Last Jedi, I still liked the movie overall. The confusing, pointless story arcs are over for now, and I am genuinely curious to see where the core characters go from here. My biggest hope is that since the story is far enough removed from The Force Awakens now, Rian Johnson will have a lot more freedom to write what he wants in the next film. If the second part in a trilogy is supposed the lowest point for everyone involved, then maybe he can truly give us the third part that resolves everything both on the screen and behind the camera.

Wait. He's not writing or directing Episode IX?

"Godfather Syndrome" in Movies

It's no news to anyone that movie sequels tend to pale in comparison to their original films. This can be disappointing enough to fans, but it can be all the more disappointing when a film has at least one good sequel and then a bad one. It gives us a false sense of security, a belief that the creative minds behind a franchise can do no wrong, and that makes it feel almost like a betrayal when a bad sequel finally comes along.

We've seen this happen in series like Terminator, The Dark Knight, Scream, Shrek, and dozens of others, but the odd thing that a lot of those franchises seem to share is that they didn't start to go bad until their third installment. This occurrence is so common that it's even come to be called "Godfather Syndrome" after one of its most infamous casualties. Why is the third time not the charm in so many franchises? The reasons vary, though a few trends do seem to crop up.

One frequent cause of Godfather Syndrome, of course, is studio interference. The second film in a series is often made as an experiment to see how fans of the original will respond to sequels. If that experiment is a huge success, like the sequel Aliens was, the studio tends to apply more pressure on the filmmakers for the next sequel in order to take the most advantage of the franchise's popularity. The result in this case was Alien 3, which had its release date announced before the script was finished and had to severely compromise its story, effects, and most other creative aspects in order to meet that deadline. There's also the case of Spider-Man 3, where the studio forced director Sam Raimi to include a popular villain from the comics despite his story already having two other villains in it. In the end, each franchise was left with a third film that most fans consider to be a convoluted letdown.

Another common cause of Godfather Syndrome is a change in the creative team behind a film series. Filmmakers have changing passions just like any other type of artist, so it's rare for them to remain involved with a franchise to the same extent throughout its entire run. However, if the director, writer, or any other major player hands the reins to someone new in between films, the change in style is usually noticeable. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but if the key visionaries in a film series are replaced after making the first two films, a lot of their understanding of the series's themes, character arcs, and overall identity is at risk of being lost in Part 3.

For instance, the original X-Men trilogy saw a change in director from Bryan Singer to Brett Ratner for its third film X-Men: The Last Stand, and this led to a huge shift in the presentation. Major characters acted nothing like themselves, subtle undertones were replaced with ludicrous action set pieces, and storylines set up in the previous films were either badly mishandled or dropped altogether. This sequel simply didn't mesh with its predecessors, and when that happens with the third film of a trilogy that follows an ongoing story arc, it can cheapen all three films.

Probably the most disheartening cause of Godfather Syndrome, however, is when the original creators themselves simply lose their touch. Just look at the syndrome's namesake, the Godfather trilogy. The Godfather Part III was written and directed by Francis Ford Coppola just like the first two films, but more than a decade had passed in between the release of Part II and the beginning of Part III's production. No storyteller is going to have the same style or perspective after such a long time, and even though Part III tried to center itself around this idea of time changing people, the fact remained that it didn't feel like a Godfather film.

In other cases, the writers run out of ideas within the scope of the series's universe after two movies and they expand the scope too much in the third one. That's why we got a third Pirates of the Caribbean film that barely took place in the Caribbean and had more characters and storylines in it than a George R.R. Martin daydream.

These aren't even the only three causes of Godfather Syndrome. Sometimes if the second movie in a series ends in a cliffhanger, the third movie gets bogged down with having to resolve those plot threads while also telling its own story. Other times the franchise starts to become self-aware after the second film's reception and panders more in the third installment. And then there are instances where a third film isn't inherently bad, but the second film was just so good that no other sequel can measure up to it. All three of these factors seem to afflict Return of the Jedi, and while it often gets hailed as the weakest film in the original Star Wars trilogy, I really don't know any Star Wars fans who hate it.

Bottom line, making any good film is something of a cinematic miracle. It takes a perfect storm of things going right in order for the product to turn out well, and unless that film is Part 1 of a preplanned story arc, every one of those things has to go right all over again for each sequel to turn out the same way. If a franchise is lucky enough to make that happen more than once, it probably can only make it happen twice -- but that doesn't stop Hollywood from trying at least three times. We fans may see Godfather Syndrome as a stab in the back from the film world, but in the words of The Godfather (and also, sadly, the third Pirates of the Caribbean film), "It's nothing personal. It's just business."

Is "Star Wars: The Force Awakens" Really That Good?

Well, it's been one full month since Star Wars made its return to the big screen with Episode VII: The Force Awakens, and man, what a return this has been. The movie has already surpassed Avatar to become the highest grossing film of all time (ironic, since George Lucas once complained that The Phantom Menace was never going to beat Titanic, another James Cameron picture), and not only is it tough to find someone who hasn't seen it, but it's tough to find someone who hasn't seen it more than once and who doesn't still have plans to see it again. There hasn't been nearly this much hype and praise for one movie since maybe The Avengers three and a half years ago, and even after a whole month, The Force Awakens is still going strong.

But is the film really that good?

It's certainly not a terrible film, but given the history of the franchise, you have to wonder if people love The Force Awakens so much because of its own merits or just because of how disappointing the last three installments in the series were. Would people have been so approving if this had been the first Star Wars film to come out after the original trilogy?

One major thing that The Force Awakens always seemed to have going for it was that it wasn't helmed by George Lucas in any way. It was helmed by people with an outside perspective who probably knew from personal experience what the fans wanted to see in a new Star Wars movie, which was a lot of throwbacks to the original 1977 film. The only problem, as many critics have already pointed out, is that one of those throwbacks ended up being the plot of the original 1977 film.

It'd be one thing if The Force Awakens just offered another take on the Hero's Journey archetype story, but this is about as definite a ripoff of the original Star Wars plot as you can get, right down to the McGuffin being a droid with top secret data smuggled in its system. People debate whether this was just a story formula that Disney forced on the filmmakers or if the filmmakers themselves opted for it to play things safe in light of the prequels. Either way, it raises a few minor creative concerns.

It should also be noted that a few elements in the story don't carry quite as much emotional weight as they could. The protagonist Rey's fierce determination to protect and return the above mentioned droid to its owner is kind of sporadic and almost unwarranted, and her relationship with the character Finn is built more on circumstance than on actual chemistry. We don't know any of the fighter pilots who are trying to destroy the Starkiller Base well enough to really invest in them, and the Starkiller Base itself never quite reaches the same level of menace as the original Death Star despite being larger and more powerful.

A lot of that last issue probably comes from how little information the film gives about the history and setup of the galaxy's new political system. Almost nothing is known about the New Republic or any of the planets that make it up, so when the Starkiller Base destroys several of those planets at once, the horror and tragedy of that event are overshadowed by confusion about what systems we're looking at and who any of the people cowering on them are. Compare that then to the destruction of Alderaan in the original Star Wars, which worked emotionally because Alderaan was the homeworld of a character that we had grown to care about. We don't need any lengthy senate meetings discussing the politics of every system in the galaxy; we just need to have clearer identities for certain places and things.

One could give the prequel trilogy credit for at least trying to explain the political dealings of the Galactic Republic and make audiences care, but as the saying goes, there is no try.

With all of that said though, The Force Awakens does bring enough new and interesting elements to the table to keep the overall story fresh and engaging. A Stormtrooper defecting to the heroes' side is something that Star Wars fans probably never expected to see, and the presence of three intelligent, prominent female characters is actually rather groundbreaking for the series. It's also interesting after decades of reading the Expanded Universe books to see another version of how things have unfolded in the galaxy since the events of Return of the Jedi, even if some fans might object to such a huge retcon. How that retcon rewrites the lives of the franchise's original main characters and gives them all new material to work with is especially enticing.

And that's really where the heart of The Force Awakens lies. Daisy Ridley and John Boyega as the leads both do impressive jobs for newcomers, but Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher, and Harrison Ford are what bring the real emotional impact to this movie. Their appearances invoke a lot of personal memories within the audience, and unlike with most of the iconic throwbacks in this movie, that sense of nostalgia for the original heroes serves an actual diegetic function within the story. Because of that, the viewer's emotional response to it is earned.

It's also important to note how compelling all three of their performances are. Fisher and Hamill deliver quite a lot with very little dialogue or screentime, and you can really see the effect that reuniting with Star Wars has had on Harrison Ford. As much as he claims that returning as Han Solo was just another paycheck to him, it's obvious from his performance in the movie that a genuine sense of passion was tapped into during production. This is by far the most enthusiasm that Ford has conveyed on film in at least the past ten years, proving not only that the screen legend still has it in him, but that he really is the perfect Han. It takes a true spark of magic from the material to accomplish something like that.

What's more, the new character Kylo Ren is probably the most clever post-Darth Vader villain that Star Wars has ever created. That's not to say that the character himself is very smart (he's actually kind of the opposite, if you think about it), but the idea behind him is ingenious.

It's a proven fact that no matter what kind of villain this franchise gives us, fans will always compare him or her to Darth Vader, and he or she will always pale by comparison. The filmmakers behind The Force Awakens knew that, and since their film takes place after the events of the original trilogy, they rolled with that idea and made it the whole point of Kylo Ren's character. You're right; he's not as cool as Darth Vader, but he's trying his darnedest to be, and if you ever remind him that he's not as cool as Darth Vader, he'll stab one of your favorite good guys with a lightsaber. All criticism of this villain's inferiority is pointless because the filmmakers are in on the joke this time around. You really have to applaud them for that.

So once again, is Star Wars: The Force Awakens really as good as audiences have made it out to be? The answer: no, but it doesn't fall too short of those accolades. It's not the greatest Star Wars movie ever made, but neither was the original 1977 film, if we can be honest with ourselves. The 1977 film was an introduction to the original trilogy's story, an appetizer that came before the entrée that its sequels were. The Force Awakens does its job of introducing its characters and conflict in a fun way, and now that it's shown the studio that Star Wars is still extremely profitable, riskier and more complex films are probably on the horizon.

In short, The Force Awakens is, to put it simply, a new hope.