It’s the Rage4Media 6th anniversary
And I can only apologise for how few Rage Reviews there have been this year. My focus has shifted away from smaller direct to DVD films with weird quirks and annoyances to big budget blockbusters and franchises, more over I’ve shifted away from older films to more recent stuff, not entirely but this is largely down a work benefit that gives me a discounted cinema pass that means I’ve seen a lot more recent films there.
Beyond that, I can say assuredly that less films annoy me in quite the way things used to, perhaps it’s down to me. I was 21 when I started this blog, and my opinions are hopefully becoming a bit more nuanced.
But don’t think for a minute this format is going away. If Cats taught me anything last year, it’s that bad exists in ways I’d never imagined before and I still can ignite passionate rage when I want to.
Speaking of which, let’s start with that thing that will get me hate comments: Star Wars: The Last Jedi is not a bad film. It’s a good one, though not without its problems, some of which are massively overstated by critics of the film and some are just bad faith nonsense because they don’t like what a character did and have a creepy feeling of ownership over a character, often to the point where they forget that the character has flaws.
It’s very difficult to say something goes against Luke’s character when there’s at least a 30-year time gap from the last time we saw him. A lot can happen in 30-years, is all.
But enough
defending the Last Jedi, I have a whole review dedicated to that, let’s get
instead to what this review is ultimately leading up to, bashing the Rise of
Skywalker.
Colin Trevorrow was originally set to write and direct this film but left owing to creative differences. This is becoming an all-too-familiar pattern, Disney. Then again, given that his last film was the abysmal Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, maybe they did us a favour.
Replacing him is JJ Abrams… The Force Awakens had its moments, and I honestly like both his Star Trek films, against the popular grain on Into Darkness, I know. The problem is he’s very safe and he’s following up on a director who had a more out-there approach, an approach that had divisive feedback. Also, judging from what I hear about Lost, he’s good at setting up interesting mysteries but sucks at paying them off.
Probably not helping is Chris Terrio being his co-writer. What happened to Chris Terrio? He won an academy award for Argo, then he wrote Batman v Superman, and then Justice League. To reiterate again, however, I do not bring up the writers by name to shame them, I merely do it to provide some context as to what might’ve been going on behind the scenes and how a combination of factors lead to the bafflingly awful product we ended up with. It’s entirely possible Abrams and Terrio had a brilliant script and it was messed up through editing and we don’t know the degree of contribution each writer gave, so it’d be foolish to lay the blame squarely at anyone. Disney and LucasFilm president Kathleen Kennedy are not off the hook here either, I will get to them at the end as this preamble is long enough already.
The end result was the film being the first $1bn disappointment in recorded history, making less money than either of its predecessors; with a 52% critical rating on Rotten Tomatoes, the lowest rating of any live action Star Wars film, prequels included.
One last
thing before we start this proper, the novel: I haven’t read it and if the book
explains a plot-hole in the film, it’s still a plot-hole in the film. The fact
that the novel spawned several articles explaining what should’ve just been
explained in the movie is in and of itself a major problem.
