(no subject)

[skygiants]

Poor genarti has already been the victim of too many of my efforts to explain to her and myself why, despite liking many things about the latest Star Wars movie, it left me sadder than I wanted to be, so now I am going to dump it on the internet instead. Hi, internet!

I walked out of that film thinking 'gosh, that bodycount, this feels like the highest ever for a Star Wars film maybe?' This is patently not true. It is not true even for Star Wars Movies That Have Come Out In The Past Three Years. In The Force Awakens, the First Order destroy an entire planet. In Rogue One, literally everyone dies! But I walked out of The Force Awakens feeling delighted and joyous, and I walked out of Rogue One feeling ... OK, mostly feeling really, deeply understood in the matter of the difficulties of digital archiving but also feeling like that was a movie that understood its own costs and was saying something with them that I thought was worth saying.

It's not just that about 95% of the Rebellion dies in The Last Jedi. It's a combination of the two facts that:
- the movie is very careful to make you feel the impact of the deaths
- Finn, Rose and Poe all achieve an astonishing amount of nothing at all with their plotline except to accidentally bring about a whole lot of death that would otherwise have been avoided

And I feel weird about it because, you know, in principle I do appreciate some of these Hot Narrative Takes on Standard Star Wars Tropes. I don't like invisible death onscreen, normally, I would much rather know and care about who's dying onscreen than have the fact of all that death be ignored. And I do, in theory, like that wild gambles don't always pay off, that sometimes a chance results in a failure. But the combination of those things, to the degree that it was in this film -- it felt like too much for me.

Or rather, I guess, it feels like too much if all those dead ships and that failed plan and that massive mistake aren't going to haunt Finn, Rose and Poe for the entirety of the third movie. I don't actually want it to. I like all those characters, Finn is my favorite character, I don't want the narrative where they now have to spend the third movie with the blood of a whole bunch of friends and allies (...well, Poe and Rose's friends and allies, I guess Finn didn't actually know any of them, BUT STILL) on their hands. That doesn't sound like fun to watch, and I don't actually think it's the third movie we'll get (though, I mean, I could be wrong.) But I also don't want a narrative where all those deaths don't actually matter enough to get our beloved space heroes depressed about it. So either way I'm not going to be happy about the fallout from this film, and I resent the narrative decision-making that put me in that position, because I want to be happy and I want to enjoy watching our space heroes quip and bounce around and have adorable hugs with no qualms whatsoever.

Oh, well. Finn and Rey had a very good hug and the new Disney aliens were very cute and Luke's melodramatic teleconference battle with Kylo Ren was hilarious, it's not like I didn't enjoy myself. Lovely visuals! Lots of fodder for the Emo Kylo Ren Twitter account! RED SAND.