The Watch - 'Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker': A Shocking Disappointment (SPOILERS) | The Watch

Episode Date: December 23, 2019

If you liked 'Rise of Skywalker,' you're not going to like this podcast. The latest movie left us totally confused about where the franchise wants to go (4:15). We break down what worked and didn't work in the latest installment (23:35). Hosts: Chris Ryan and Andy Greenwald Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today's episode of The Watch is brought to you by Star Wars. Jedi Fallen Order, the new action-adventure game from Respawn Entertainment. Taking place between Star Wars Revenge of the Sith and Star Wars A New Hope, players, players will wield a lightsaber, hone their force powers, and adventure across the galaxy in hopes of rebuilding the Jedi Order. Become a Jedi and Star Wars Jedi Fallen Order, available now on Xbox 1, PS4, and PC-rated T-14. Today's episode of The Watch is brought to you by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration,

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Hello, and welcome to The Watch. My name is Chris Ryan. I am an editor at the ringer.com. And joining me on the other line, is that a way-finding? in his cloak or is he just happy to see me? It's Andy Greenwald! Chris, I wish more than anything that we could be in the same room for this last podcast of the Skywalker era. We are on opposite coasts. We are both remote. We are talking into our task cams. We got coach Kaya in the booth helping us out with the play calling. That's right.

But I just want people to understand that though I cannot look into your baby blues right now, we are force-connected. So that if I reached out into this conversation, right now, I could 100% pull back a box of butterscotch crimpet tasty cakes into California. I was just going to make that joke except with hers sour cream and onion chips. I am coming to you live from the back room in my mom's house in Philadelphia. Andy is where he always is in an undisclosed location in Los Angeles working on Briar Patch. But we are here to talk to you about Star Wars, colon, the rise of Skywalker. This will be a spoiler-rific podcast episode.

So if you have not seen the movie yet, I suggest you do so before you listen. Andy and I got lucky enough to see the movie at its premiere last week. We got to spend some really quality time together because we didn't have access to our phones. So we just stared into each other's eyes. A couple things. If you ever really want to spend quality time with a friend, I highly recommend you go see, I want to say, Aziz Ansari do a show in Detroit. Because they got these like Yodel bags or Yoda bags in this case.

you put your phone into it, and then what are you supposed to do? We don't even wear watches, so I don't even know what time it was anymore, but we had a good time, and I want to also stress, before we even get into it, because I want to begin with the positive part of the podcast, because I don't even need to spoil the fact that I think people know already how I feel about this movie, that, you know, I may be working on the finale of a TV show, but I have no juice. I got into the screening by the good graces of Jedi Master Chris Ryan. who just waltzed us down the red carpet.

It was really something. And not only did you get me into the screen, Chris, you kind of, we didn't talk about this, even during the interminable time we were stuck talking to each other. You know, I got in the line optimistically for people with G last names behind friend of the podcast, Jeff Garland.

And then Chris big time me with that, hey, buddy, you're here under my name in a different line. Yeah, you're my plus one. You're my plus one. You're my plus one forever, man. You're my red five, buddy. let's get into some like initial reactions. You know, and like Andy said, we're going to try and come at this from a bunch of different angles.

Obviously, Star Wars is something we've been talking about for the entirety of this podcast. And I think we have over the years like our relationship to it has changed a bit, especially as this new trilogy has come out. And that's something that I think a lot of people are grappling with is their relationship to Star Wars and what Star Wars means. to them and then what this movie means to them. So, Andy, why don't we start with, for our listeners, because I was on the front lines for this, what were some of your initial reactions to the rise of Spike Skywalker? Well, I actually want to take one further step back and say, if this movie brought you joy

or happiness or closure or anything other than deep-seated confusion and sadness, I'm really happy for you. I don't want anything we say to be seen as a repudiation of your experience with this movie. I think that we saw that firsthand because sitting two seats to your left was noted film director Kevin Smith wearing his trademark shorts, who at a moment in this movie, and this is a pack Dolby theater, we had just seen a touching moment where Stephen Spielberg, a couple rows in front of us, hugged Harrison Ford. Like, you can't make it up, folks. It was all in front of us. Hollywood.

The cast is there, JJ's there, Q the Chernobyl music, Bob Iger was there, Kathy Kennedy, and packed house, and the aforementioned Harrison Ford has his cameo in the movie, and I was worried the loudest noise in the Dolby Theater at that moment was the sound of my aged eyeballs

creaking as they rolled all the way back in my head. But I am clearly not the voice of the people because film director Kevin Smith let out an ejaculatory cry and then screamed, yeah, JJ, at that same moment. So obviously people's

mileage or parsecs may vary when it comes to this, right? Like, I just feel like it's important to say that. Yeah. Clearly, this hit notes that resonate for some people. Yeah, we were at the premiere,

like we were treated to, uh, I would say like 90 minutes of promotional materials leading up to the start of the, basically, 90 minutes of promo material before Bob Eiger and Kathleen Kennedy and J.J. Abrams gave a speech to the assembled audience. And the majority of that promotional material while there was lots of stuff about here's how we do costumes and here's this and that. A lot of it was about emphasizing the idea that Star Wars is for the fans.

That they have a part in this. And I think that there is something beautiful about that. and I think that there is something corrosive about that. I think that's good for Star Wars fans. I think that is good for people who want to experience Star Wars on screens and at theme parks and through video games and through kind of elements of the Star Wars experience. I think that's fine that people want to do that. But I think that there is something wrong with looking at a movie

and making a movie quote unquote for fans. I think that they're that I'm not really concerned with Star Wars. Wars. They're going to be good Star Wars movies and bad Star Wars movies. People might be disappointed with the way the Skywalker saga ended this nine movies cycle. But I'm more concerned about where we are in terms of storytelling and filmmaking than I am where we are in terms of Star Wars, if that makes any sense. It makes a lot of sense. And I think that going into it, I mean, I'll just say this. Like, my jaw is still on the floor after watching this movie. I am in total shock as to what I saw. I'm totally confused. And, you know, I admire and respect so many of

the people involved in this film in front of and behind the camera that I can't believe this is the end product. And I do think it's, I don't think it's possible to talk about it or dissect it on its own merits as a movie, which it failed, I think almost entirely, without taking in the larger cultural context and moment that birthed it, which is, I think, what you're speaking to. Yeah, fandom. The rise of fandom and the fall of, like, thoughtful engagement. I think that the only person who may have been unhappier than me

during this screening was Adam Driver. And I think the only way he could have been less happy was if everyone in the theater was singing a rousing number from the Steven Sonheim musical company in unison while he was on stage getting applause for being there at the movie. I mean, I think this movie is relentlessly incoherent and just, I just don't understand. I just truly am still trying to wrestle with it. And I don't think a successful summation of a nine movie 40-year saga, which by the way,

I don't know if this was ever supposed to be that, but apparently that's how we are now retconning this whole thing, should leave you thinking, well, they probably should have left it in 1983. They probably should not have picked this up again. And I think that's sort of the thing that I'm wrestling with and thinking about, which is that if people point to the first Star Wars movie as the birth of contemporary fan culture and the sort of the big bang, if you will, of everything that came after in terms of nostalgia and communities and expanded universes and the debts that

that movie studios and cultural makers owe to the people who support them, it's kind of, I guess, fitting then for its conclusion, at least in cinematic form, to be kind of a death knell for the

culture created, which is really hyperbolic, but that is absolutely how I felt after watching this movie. Yeah, I mean, so are you saying that you feel like in some ways this is a capstone for your engagement with this stuff? Well, I don't think it merited the attention. I mean, look, look, we can, I don't know,

why don't we start with the movie itself? And then I think we can unwind from there. Because I think there's just some essential things, that Star Wars was always sort of the North Star for all the other things that came in its wake, including the highly successful in all areas, I think, Marvel Cinematic Universe. The fact is that for a while, when Disney bought Star Wars,

we were saying like, boy, of course they're going to get it right because the smartest minds in Hollywood are working on this and it's the sacred text. But this all made me think how thin and individual driven this story was, right? Like all the all the kind of reworking and retconning that had to be done to make it just about the friends we made along the way and the force being both a religion and a healing agent and also telepathy and all the other things that really aren't there in George Lucas's movies. It really, it really, really made me rethink how I felt about the whole thing in the context that we live in now. But that's it.

I didn't have that problem. I didn't have that problem. So, like, I think that one thing I would say for almost every Star Wars movie, including like solo and, you know, from top to bottom is whether or not I thought they were great or silly or fine or flawed or packed with mumbo-jumbo or not, I always remembered them. And we're recording this on a Thursday. This will come out on a Monday. the Rise of Skywalker is already leaving my brain.

Now, part of that is just the fact that I'm 42. I have a lot of stuff in my brain now. I have like, I have, you know, you find you're forgetting things more than you're remembering them maybe. But the lack of memorable moments and resonance that I took from this movie in a movie that is self-consciously designed to create those kinds of moments that will live forever. Right. is kind of the biggest takeaway, that it is supposed to be a greatest hits package of Star Wars moments,

both homages to past movies and giving finality and answers and breathtaking reveals to the new story. And I felt like it just completely did itself such a disservice in the way that it told its story, which we can get into now if you want to. Yeah, I mean, look, you're doomed from the first second when the main antagonist of a story,

a trilogy, is introduced to the trilogy in the opening crawl of the third movie. This movie was a rap at the crawl. It was a rap. It was, and it was, you know, because the crawl, the crawl is what the people

who made the rise of Skywalker, I feel like that crawl is what they wanted the Last Jedi to be. And we don't have to relitigate last Jedi to be. I, like, I certainly don't really want, I don't really want to do that. But you can see that there are two or three movies in the rise of Skywalker and that the crawl is like, had the other guy done his job, we would already know that Palpatine is back,

that this is this situation, that the first order is giving way to the final order, that there is this Sith Legion in the far reaches of space that is indestructible. And each ship has a planet killing weapon and all this other crap that all has to kind of come through in the first 10, 15, 20 minutes of the movie, that's all supposed to be in Last Jedi. Yeah, I mean, look, I know I always do this and I apologize to our listeners, but like, we're talking about, I want to make it about the text and I want to talk about the movie, but I just can't stop going back to the larger picture, which is just the wrongheadedness of the entire enterprise, not to reference another fan favorite franchise, that I think that the plan, which was flawed from the

beginning, right? To pump these movies out in a span of four years, I think they would like a mulligan on that because it tied them to release dates and expectations before they had any idea of a story, certainly a three-movie story. But you just think about the things that were set up, that this was maybe, this was going to be a new story with new characters, but they also had to service the legacy of the old ones. And so you get JJ Abrams who approaches this. And I think often quite brilliantly, he approaches a lot of story, like a puzzle box. And it's like, well, I'll basically remake a new hope, but remix it. And look, remixing can work.

We adore Damon Lindelof's Watchman, which was a remix of the original. So he introduces new characters who are archetypes that are familiar to us, and he casts really well, casts really winning actors to play these parts. But, okay, Carrie Fisher's there too, and Harrison Ford is there too. Then slowly it morphs into this impossible thing that is straddling both the old world and the new characters. And then Ryan Johnson comes in, and, you know, again, to our mind. I think positively, does the work of trying to snap that cable to the old and literally says

kill the past and does this hard work of giving each of the new characters an individual arc and a reason for being. And then JJ comes back at the end to sweep all that under the rug and say, no, no, it was only ever one story, the same story from the beginning. And it's kind of amazing because by so doing, you end up kind of making a movie about nothing that doesn't really do service to the old characters and definitely doesn't do service to the new characters and just leaves you feeling that weird fullness but lack of nourishment that you get from fast food restaurants where all of the food has been chemically and scientifically designed to hit your pleasure centers and make you keep eating it even though you're not sure why you're doing it anymore.

Yeah, I mean, this is the major, I think we tend to look in pop culture at everything is just like everything else. And what you're saying about fast food really. makes a lot of sense to me because the thing that I felt like when I was watching this movie was I was watching a video game. This movie has way more to do with like, excuse my outdated reference to video games, but to pick one at random, Legend of Zelda, where it's like everything is a task, everything is a little bit mini quest, and they have to put together this collection of items that they are finding to get to the final boss that they will fight in a way where they have their accumulated powers that they have accrued over the course of playing this game

and defeat that final boss. Now, you could make that argument is that video games are just taking, you know, from basic storytelling. That's fine. But the actual mechanics of this movie are far more, have far more in common with like a video game than they do with a Kurosawa movie or a Western, which, fine, shut up old guy, go back to your Criterion channel, that's fine. But they don't, this movie doesn't even have anything to do with a new hope. And I actually have a pretty good example of what I'm talking about if you'll allow me. Can I do that? I would love it. Okay. So this is the third movie in this new saga. Think about the third movie in the original saga, The Return of the Jedi, right? That's like a opens with about a 30 plus minute opening act.

It's cloaked in mystery. It's all about building tension. You've got these mysterious strangers arriving at Jabba's compound. There's like this evil gambler warlord who we spend we've heard about and what heard about, but now we're actually getting to see him and he's more grotesque than we possibly could have imagined. And that whole first act ends with a prison break. And my favorite line from that whole first act is when they're on the speeder going out to get executed.

And Luke says, I grew up here, you know. And Han says, you're going to die here, you know. And it's like, obviously it's like a really funny line. Harrison Ford delivers it perfectly. And it's also a perfect piece of character writing because it's about Luke at this point has like this sense of self-mythology

and he's a little bit conceited he knows that he's a Jedi knight now and Han is always there to deflate him a little bit but what matters is we've been to Tatooine before the audience grew up there just like Luke did

and it matters because it's one of the half dozen locations we visited across the first three movies there are six planets in the first 30 minutes of the rise of Skywalker. Like, it is completely tripping over itself to burn through plot. And what it doesn't get is the reason why we remember these movies, the reason why these

movies still matter to people is because of time spent, because there is space in between moments to build tension so that you can get excited about something. How does that first act culminate? Like, what's the most exciting thing that happens in the beginning of the Rise of Jedi is Luke does a fucking backflip? that's it. That's it. He just does a back flip off of a diving board and people are like, oh my God, this is the coolest thing. I thought that was the coolest thing I'd ever seen. Now, okay, Boomer, but does anything that Daisy Ridley does, with the exception of maybe flipping over a tie fighter, that ultimately doesn't matter because there are no consequences to her doing that, actually wind up, like, mattering in this movie. No, and I love the example you're using. Tattooing is a great example. because if you look at this new trilogy,

Ray begins her journey on another desert planet. Why? Unclear. Regardless, she ends this movie back on Tatouine, a place that Leia never set foot on to pay tribute to Leia. But more than that, to pay tribute to people like Kevin Smith who was sitting next to us clapping wildly, right? That's who she was paying tribute to in that moment,

which is different. Second point from what you're saying, something happened at the end of Empire Strikes Back that had to be addressed at the time. the beginning of Return to the Jedi. Time had passed. Stakes had arisen. And it was all about addressing those stakes, which were character-based stakes. Yes, we knew Darth Vader was out there. Yes, we knew the empire was bad and blah, blah, blah, but we were worried about our wisecracking friend who needed to be rescued, or would he even be rescued. How would he be rescued? All of that

is built into a 30-minute set piece at the start of a movie that, for some reason, still has a relatively negative rotten tomatoes rating among fans, right? Maybe because of the teddy bears at the end who make an appearance in this movie as well. Today's episode of The Watch is brought to you by American Express. I am one of the lucky few with a commute in L.A.

that only takes about 15 minutes, but I still make the most of my drive by listening to my favorite podcasts. I'll get a head start on shows like House of Carbs, binge mode, or the big picture, and then I'll finish up with an episode when I get into the office. It's a great way to ease myself into the day.

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and experience the story from new angles. So obviously this is a pretty cool thing. You basically experience scenes from Star Wars that involve Ray's Lightsaber in an immersive audio way. So you wear these glasses or you wear these headphones and you are put inside these scenes from Star Wars. I tried it out with a scene from A New Hope

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But absolutely. So fundamentally, and again, I don't want to drag the. individual people who made this movie because what was anyone supposed to do with any of this when I'm going to ask you a couple of questions and see if you have answers and I'm not doing this facetiously we did not practice this as a bit this is just occurring to me now Chris what is the first order honestly man like I know that there are answers to all these questions

I know that I but I I don't know as a person who has watched these nine movies in the Mandalorian and Rogue One and solo and And I haven't watched Clone War Wars. I haven't watched a lot of this other stuff. Like I would call myself like a pretty passionate Star Wars fan, but not a completest. And I don't. Do you know? Did you know ever?

No. It's just the empire. I always just was like, this is the empire. They need the empire again. It's English people with high collars with fascist tendencies. That's it. What is the resistance? Are there 10 people in the resistance?

Are there 10,000 people in the resistance? No idea. What are the stakes of any of this conflict? Whatever suits the scene that they're shooting. Exactly. And it has no logic. Because when the Armada shows up at the end and they don't rip, I mean, you could say they rip off Dunkirk or maybe they're nodding to Dunkirk

or they're nodding to the idea of regular people rising up against a fascistic power. But the explanation that they're, They tried to get those people to come before and they didn't, but then Lando does, I guess, a light speed jump across the galaxy to raise an army. And that just works. I have no idea, man. They didn't slow down enough to tell us. And Poe's like, Lando, you did it.

What do you do? Okay, here's another question. What is Finn's story? Who is Finn and what is his story in these movies? Well, I would say that Finn and Po are the two reasons why. these movies never fully achieved liftoff, the three of them. And it's actually no disrespect to either one of those actors who are actually probably my two favorite actors,

with the exception of Adam Driver, in the films, it's just that that's not true. I mean, I really like Daisy Ridley, too. I don't know what I'm saying. I like all the people involved. I just think that those two characters are probably supposed to be one character. Yes. There should probably just be a stormtrooper who changes sides.

and Poe should be kind of in the background. He should be wedge, man. That guy should be wedge. There are so many good ideas in this trilogy, which is one of the reasons why I think we're talking about this with this air of incredulity in our voice, right? Like the idea of a stormtrooper taking off his mask and then joining some sort of rebellion

after the horrors that he or she has seen, that's a movie. That's a trilogy. Similarly, the son of Han Solo and Leah, turning slowly turning to evil and then redeeming himself, that's a movie. Hell, that's a trilogy. But, you know, a wisecracking starship pilot making his way through, you know, on a lower level, through these high stakes galaxy-sized adventures, that's a movie, more likely, that's a Disney pluse series that we're going to get inevitably. But whatever, all of those things at the same time aren't a movie.

Those are a lot of ideas in which all the heavy lifting and connective tissue happens not just off-screen between the movies, but it happens in the narrative around the movies. And so that's what I wanted to zero in on here, which is the point you made. Finn and Poe are redundant. I think Poe is supposed to die in the first movie, but someone was like, no, that's a cool character. And we have Oscar Isaac, keep him around, thus neutering Finn. So I guess Finn was maybe in love with Ray throughout this movie, but they didn't even pay off the thing you wanted to say to her. So he doesn't do anything other than talk exposition throughout. And then this idea that these movies are all about friendship, which I guess comes from the Luke Leia Han relationship. And then people were up in

arms over the fact that Ryan Johnson separated them, even though those characters are often separated in Empire Strikes Back as well. So this whole idea now that they're best friends who hug each other and they're going to make it through things together is just inserted into this movie, the way flavor is inserted into a holiday turkey with one of those big basting guns, or the way Lady True is inserted into her mother in the season finale of Watchman. Sorry for the Spoilers. That doesn't feel like anything that happened organically. I don't know who these people are.

I don't know why they're friends. I don't know what they've been doing. What I do know is that the fandom was upset that they weren't together. And so this movie makes a big show of showing them together as if that sort of seals, you know, ties off the knot or squares off the circle of the whole argument about what they're doing. Yeah, it's interesting. Obviously, and I'm sure Sean and Mal have talked about this on the big picture, but you've mentioned it

the inevitable comparisons are going to be made to Avengers and Endgame but also the Marvel Cinematic Universe project and say what you will about the sort of relative importance of those movies I think they're obviously hugely

important culturally I think there are a bunch of movies in that franchise that are really good some of them are great some of them are disposable but the thing that's always kind of been strange about Star Wars is that Star Wars fans, and I count myself among them, always feel like Star Wars is

being taken away from them. Did you ever have that feeling when you were a kid? Like, like, there was, like, you were running out of time with Star Wars. Part of it is like you're running out of time to be young enough to really believe in it and enjoy it. And then there was like this absence where Lucas was like, I'm not making any more of these. And then it was like, they got re-released with new graphic, like new special effects and the prequels

came out and it was like Star Wars is back but then it went away again and then Star Wars came back it's always coming back and going away like Marvel has done that consistent constant presence thing

and because of that even though Endgame was enormously important to it you never felt like any one movie had to do the work of all the movies and Star Wars doesn't have that

Star Wars is always like there will be answers the ball will get pushed forward and this could be the last one. And I don't know why it has that feeling around it that other franchises, I feel like don't. Some franchises should. Like, Terminator, by all means,

feel like you have a finite amount of Terminator movies to make. But with Star Wars, I was like, you're talking about all these different plot lines that could support Disney Plus shows or other movies. I have no idea why that wasn't their approach. Clearly, Kathleen Kennedy thinks it should be their approach. In the L.A. Time, she talked about basically the trilogy model being outmoded for them

and then be like that is a restrictive way of telling a story you essentially have to build up and down too fast. She knows it. I'm surprised. I guess I'm surprised that I feel this way, but it's almost strange that we're going to get to the end of this and it feels like so many people were running out the clock and trying to fulfill contractual obligations

rather than tell the story. And get through this. I mean, what are we doing, everybody? A franchise. that's recognizable is not in and of itself a story. It's not the same thing. Just because you have a universe and blasters and lightsabers doesn't mean you have a story.

You can't just assume that you do. And this idea that every one of these movies or any kind of entertainment that we engage in these days is really just a pop quiz. It's just a series of questions that needs to be answered really needs to be challenged aggressively. Because what questions were answered by the first Star Wars trilogy

that weren't asked by the trilogy, such as, what's the story with this kid on the desert planet? What questions were left to answer in the Star Wars mythos that demanded this movie? I suppose the only one

that comes to mind is, did the emperor fuck? And well, we got a resounding yes to that. Yo, did you know that one of Palpatine's family members is named Ken? Oh my God.

This is so up my alley. It's Kendallina, but he's known as, Ken. I mean, as someone who spent an entire season of an after show on HBO talking about Kevin Lannister and how inevitably all fantasy sagas run out of cool names, this is really, really my wheelhouse. I know. Yeah, I mean, I definitely did not have other questions about the emperor coming into this new trilogy of movies. I was totally fine with, and I thought, Honestly, the brilliance of Force Awakens and this new trilogy was,

what would happen if you were Luke Skywalker and nobody loved you? Or what would happen if you were somebody like Ben Solo and you didn't, you broke back. And that was such a fascinating question. It obviously mirrored Anakin. It obviously mirrored Darth Vader. But I feel like you could see that they were like, people are too attached to Adam Driver.

He has to have a redemptive moment. There needs to be something more evil than Kylo Ren out there that's hanging over this whole thing. Didn't that feel that way? Yeah, absolutely. And also, Adam Driver and Daisy Ridley had really interesting, exciting chemistry. I mean, I think I want to just sidebar. We're talking over Ray and Daisy Ridley. I think she gives a really cool and muscular performance.

I think it really fucking does matter. Even long after these movies are forgotten. the image of her with a lightsaber kicking ass. Like my daughter has not seen these movies, but she knows who Ray is. And I think that's really cool. But to the Adam Driver point, you're touching it something else that I think

that's a little bit worthy of investigation, which is fulfilling fandom of people who are still loving something from their childhood. Nothing wrong with loving something from your childhood. But at a certain point, who are you making these for? And are you making them for a new generation of children, like mine, or are you making them for people who are still in touch with childlike emotions?

And that's when you get into stuff that just boggles. Like, the most provocative thing in these three movies, right, is Ben Solo kills Han Solo. He kills his death. Yeah. That happened. That's canon. And JJ did that. J.J. Abrams did that.

And J.J. Abrams did that and deserves credit for that, for whatever, you know, for writing that check. but then cashing it by having the same character encounter his ghost dad saying, I forgive you for killing me, wiping away the stakes. Similarly, this movie goes out of its way to keep every essential character.

Sorry Greg Grunfeld, right? That's his name, dude from alias in every J.J.A. movie. But keep every major character alive in play. Not even see fucking 3PO can stay forgetful for long. Right. And yet casually, with a push of a button, it eliminates entire planets. So an entire planet with millions of people is wiped out in a Holocaust delights that our world has never actually seen. But luckily, Carrie Russell and her spacesuit zipped away in time to continue to sexually banter with,

but not sexually, I guess, romantically and flirt, chastly banter with Po. So it's, it's, this What are the stakes? You just, you remember a new hope. They made Leo watch her planet get destroyed. Like, we get five seconds of Oscar Isaac being like, Kajima died. Kajemi died. Like, they blew up that planet.

Like, what, what is that place? Like, do I have to have a subscription to some comic or read novelizations to know about what I'm seeing? And we spend two seconds on that. But you guys can't let go of anybody who you remember from the original movies. They have to come back. They have to be ghosts.

I liked Star Wars because it introduced me to weird adult themes. It made me feel, it made me curious about, like, what it was like to grow older. It made me curious about what it would be like when a father died. It made me curious about

what it would feel like to feel like I wasn't living up to my potential in the world or that I was, like, confused about that this idea that it has to be about friendship and no one ever literally leaving you and all that stuff. Like, it's very sweet, and I think it appeals to children, and it makes for good fodder for

if you're going to spend a day at Disneyland. But it's not why I thought this series was good in the first place. You're really onto something here, because there is something that is formative, I think, about the first movies, in that a lot of people die. And yes, there's this idea of the force, and they, quote, unquote, come back. But they don't come back. They're hovering. They're watching you.

Their spirits are felt. Maybe you hear their voice in your head at moments. But that's actually how life works when you lose people, right? They're still alive to you. What they are not is exactly the same as they were the day before they died, catching, you know, tactile objects and throwing them back at you and having full conversations. Right. Thus removing any risk of feeling their loss in the first place, right?

I mean, again, I'm realizing that my voice is rising as is my temperature in talking about something that I don't know if it's worth getting this exercise. about. But it's weird to introduce rules and then, you know, rules that actually might shape or guide your storytelling and then bend them because, I guess, someone on 4chan thought that Luke shouldn't have gone out like that. You know, it's a weird, it's a very, very weird way to be, to have a story told to you. Yeah. And the thing that you're talking about, you know, as I said, we're recording this on Thursday. I'm sure this movie will make an enormous amount of money this weekend. It's the critical reaction this film is very tepid to say the least. In some

in places it's downright hostile and like this podcast. But I really can't, I'm really curious to see whether or not it flips and this winds up being, do you think this will be embraced by people? Like, do you think that there are people out there like they gave us the Star Wars movie we've always deserved? No. I don't think this movie. has anything to do with Star Wars as anyone in 1983 or 2002, or maybe even 2015, would recognize it. This is a closed circuit that speaks to what Star Wars has become in the frenzied IP culture slash Twitterverse of 2019.

It is about itself and about satisfying the people who are going to get exercise and excited about it. Now, they will sell half a billion dollars worth of tickets for people who, over the holidays, enjoy the experience of going to a theater and seeing a rousing, loud, sci-fi action movie, which is, are God-given right as Americans or as humans on this earth? And there is nothing wrong with that. But beyond that, you know, once the stirring John Williams score begins to fade, I think

everything else about it begins to fade as, like, is. well. You know, there, there is one moment that that kind of jarred me and it speaks to that same impulse that killed Han Solo in the first movie. Whether you, whether you thought it was handled well or not handled well, it was a, it's a choice, but it's a choice you have to continue to, you know, unpack and deal with the repercussions of. It's the moment when Ray accidentally unleashes force lightning and kills Chewbacca. Yes. That's a moment. You fucking cowards. You cowards. Yeah.

Electrocut that wookie, man. What are you guys doing? Do it. If you're going to do it, do it, do it, right? Like, why did you come here to the finals if you're not going to start taking shots? Like, I don't, I truly, truly. Because it's such an unnecessary plot diversion. It's such an unnecessary plot diversion.

He follows Ray out of the ship to go get her. he gets kidnapped by people who presumably could just rush the ship. Like they don't need to just grab Chui, you know? Like they could have like just gone into the ship and killed everyone or done like how to fight or whatever. There was a confrontation to be had. But because it's about manipulating people's emotions, it's let's capture this old school character that everybody loves. So fine. Chewy gets imprisoned.

Ray's out in the desert. They're screaming at each other. come on, come on, let's go back. They pull them up. There's that incredible moment where they're fighting, I guess, for whatever reason. Because time and space do not matter in this movie. So Kylo's ability to either be psychically

or physically in front of Ray, the entire movie, even though it makes no sense at all, is fine. So he flies a tie fighter at her. She knocks him down. They have this fight, and the lightning comes out of her hands, and she blows up a transport ship above her. We don't see another transport ship, so we're left to believe that that's chewy.

And for five minutes, Ray seems bummed out because that is the first sign that you're turning to the dark side is that you can't control your powers or that you don't want to control your powers. And that lasts for all of six minutes. Before we know, before all the other characters do, that Shui's fine.

We don't want you to go through the second act of this movie being bummed out. It's like, then don't do it in the first place. Yeah, there's a tension here that I think is at the root of a lot of our mass market entertainment. And I want to be fair-minded about it because having gone through this creative experience myself this year, it's at the root of my own psychology as well. I get it. And I don't want anyone to misinterpret what I'm saying. I am not a storyteller or anything on the level of JJ Abrams or the people who made this movie. I certainly couldn't do this. But what I mean is there is a tension between the desire to be clever and risk-taking and the desire to be liked and the desire to be loved and to be embraced. And there's a healthy dose of both as in every creative person's mind at all times.

And I don't think it's necessarily one way or the other. I think it's a balancing act. But this knot that they tied themselves into, and then instead of untying it, they tied a second knot around it of Ray's parentage is the thing that I want to turn to. Because I think the Chewbacca thing is that. But the Ray thing in particular is that too, because she is set up essentially to clearly, clearly be a Skywalker. That's just everything about her is set up to be that way.

Then Ryan Johnson introduces what might be other than the death of Han Solo, the most radical idea in this trilogy, that's the era of Star Wars, which is it doesn't matter. The force can be democratic. Anybody can have it. You are nobody. This is not Star Wars babies. You can just be a person and then maybe have a say in the world. And I, you know, people who listen to this podcast know you and I like that idea quite a bit.

and it was very heavily scrubbed and retconed out of existence. But instead of just owning what was there and making the best version of it, there's this second twist put on top of it where it's like, no, no, no, no, no, no, we wouldn't do anything so obvious as the thing that we said, clearly we're thinking about doing. She's a Palpatine, which, honestly, since Palpatine hasn't been thought of in 10 or 20 years, isn't interesting. It's cleverness

to spite conventional wisdom that I think leaves us in this no place where, okay, so she's the grandchild of someone who we didn't know how to family

and is thus potentially bad, but then at the very end of the movie takes on the adoptive name of someone who she met for a little while and hung out with

on an island. It's too clever for its own good and leaves everyone unsatisfied. Yeah, anyone could be important in this universe,

in this galaxy. Even this kid sweeping up outside of a door at the end of Last Jedi who can make the broom move and it's like, who's this street urchin kid? That's what these movies should be about. And instead it winds up

being, you have to be in a club at the end of it. You know, you have to have known and trained with these people. Now, I don't really give a shit about what that message is. I mean, this movie is so packed to the gills with messaging about

friendship like you said and all these other things that I think are valuable ideas that really don't mean anything to the story whatsoever. It's so much about oh it's about this bumper sticker of what Star Wars is about rather than just telling a story within the world of Star Wars which drives me nuts because that's just like that's like political messaging. That's not actually storytelling. But beyond that yeah at the end they can't resist the idea

that this is ultimately about, don't worry, these three movies were about someone special. And that's, I get that, I get that. You know what I mean? Like, I can tell why that would bother you. You know, it's a different era to compare these movies to the Marvel movies, you know, because in a way, the Star Wars mythology is very old mythology. It's, in a way, it's more common to the DC universe,

which is like a God-based or God's-based vision of the world, where special people with special abilities inherit their destiny and fulfill them. Whereas the Marvel model, which clearly plays, it was popular in many ways over decades, but now plays globally, is that Peter Parker is just as important as Spider-Man.

Or, to put it another way, one of the reasons why I think it plays so well is that everybody is Han Solo now. And these movies kind of seem to forget that. A couple quick questions, I did want to ask you, what did Donald Gleason do to upset people? Like, one of our best young actors in the world has a lot of fun,

and Ryan Johnson had a lot of fun with him as a comic character in Last Jedi. And then this was a wild, wild five minutes of screen time for our boy in this third movie. I hope he got paid and I hope he got to use that on a nice vacation that maybe during time where he, I guess he thought maybe he'd be working. So I have to say in terms of Donald Gleason and in terms of the Palpatine stuff that you were talking about and obviously we get

about 45 seconds of Jody Comer in this movie which shout out to Jody Comer both those plot lines the idea of a rebel the idea of a spy working inside of the first slash final order and these flashbacks to raise childhood

feel like stuff stitched in from other scripts to me. Not that JJ and Chris Terry or working from somebody else's idea, although there was obviously the Colin Trevoro's script initially, and he still has a story credit along with Derek Conley. But that whole idea of a spy inside the final order and then ending it in an almost comic fashion that way

feels like something that they were like, you know what, forget this spy idea, we need to get everybody to the Palpatine player faster. Okay. That does make sense to me. my read. And that was that was something that hung over Force Awakens too. Obviously there were lots of like Force Awakens leaks in terms of what was in the script, what was supposed to happen in that movie. They were changing it somewhat on the fly. That's the thing that I mean like this whole franchise has been

operated by the seat of its they've been going by the seat of their pants for for five or six years now. And it's really, there's been some cool shit in there. But it's like you can see why. You can see why J.J. Abrams made this movie and cut this movie to move so quickly. Because they didn't have the goods, man. It's pretty wild when you think about the fact that Lucas was like doodling about, you know, Luke's star killer in his notebooks when he was in high school and college and, you know, good or ill had a vision and then waited 20 years to tell the other story he wanted to tell, which, if I remember correctly, is primarily about minstrelsy and tax collection.

So, but whatever, he had a vision. You know, it's not, it's as a industry story and as a creative story, I find it really fascinating and I would love to know the full story of Force Awakens. You know, I think he's even copped to it that scenes in the Force Awakens were filmed months after they finished production in the bad robot offices in Santa Monica. I mean, there were stormtroopers in that building in front of a green screen filling in spackling holes in that movie, you know, months or weeks before the release date. How could anyone ever do storytelling on this level under these?

conditions and this fast. And again, I really do admire people like JJ who are like, I don't hear a problem. I just think of solutions. Like, this is, there's an element that has made him successful that is drawn to the impossible challenge. And I think that's, I honestly, genuinely think that's really cool and admirable. I just don't see what can come of it. Speaking of things I don't understand, was Lando hitting on spacehorse girl at the end? Or was he just offering her like a 23-in-me trip around the galaxy? Yeah, I think that was a backdoor pilot for a Disney pluze show of Stormtrooper finds out where she's really from. Ex-Storm Trooper finds out where she's really from.

By the way, what a world where a movie designed to be the biggest movie of the year is also using precious real estate to backdoor pilot TV shows. I mean, that in of itself is a pretty fascinating industry story. And I think you're 100% right about it. Yeah, I mean, what else could that last line have been? you know. I mean, it was a nice note, but it was essentially like, hey, remember this person. This person's important. She's going to turn up on your, on your, on your subscription service in a couple of months. It's wild that we get to the end of 2019 here and we get to the end of this quote unquote saga. And so much of the promise of this five years ago or four years ago,

whenever that first Force Awakens trailer came out, so much of the promise was the idea of going into something new, the idea of forging ahead, the idea of telling new stories, the idea of seeing what the galaxy would be like after Return of the Jedi. And I kind of wonder now if there isn't anything. No. Because the best things that they have made, the best things that they have made over the last five years are Rogue One, Mandalorian, and Solo. And those are all about the past. And because they're all about the past, they all know where those stories have to go. They all have sort of fixed endpoints for those stories. And I don't know if the current setup that they have in terms of Lucasfilm and Disney.

And yes, like all the caveats you're saying, incredibly talented people who make really interesting, exciting, well-made shit all the time with this thing in particular, with all the stakeholders and with what it has to do for Disney, I don't know. Are they just going to strip it down and start again? or do you think Kathleen Kennedy's vision of we're going to have lots of different strains going, we're not going to be relying on one saga? Because that's closer to DC than it is the MCU. It is.

And I think that's where things are going out because the achievement of what the MCU did is, I think people are looking at it and realizing, no, we can't do this. This is not repeatable. This is a unique set of circumstances driven by very particular people in a moment when everything kind of clicked. The really depressing answer to your question is what would the world be like after Return of the Jedi is it can't be any different. That's the takeaway here. We talk about Marvel movies beating Star Wars, but Star Wars have become comic books, meaning nothing substantive can change because there is only one story here. That's the lesson of this last iteration of it, right?

The only things that work are filling in the holes between things we already knew or things that are so low stakes that we're just. just all cooing over a baby puppet. And I like that show, but that is still what it is, right? Like, nothing fundamentally can change because then it would be something else. So if we're going to continue a world where the empire's been defeated, we're just going to say the empire wasn't really defeated. We're just going to run it back. We're just going to play the hits.

We're just going to do it again. And that's pretty dispiriting. And I think that people who think that the back swing towards Last Jedi, is disproportionate to that movie, I really did enjoy that movie, but I think what people are really saying, not that people aren't being disingenuous, I think the note behind the note, if I may,

about The Last Jedi isn't necessarily the specifics of that movie. It was, oh, maybe this could have been something if we just gave it to someone else. If we gave it fundamentally to someone who had an idea. Now, that's risky. Just basically, you cannot do that. These these gigantic companies who are shareholder dependent just cannot justify doing that. They can justify giving it to JJ Abrams, who is a proven steward as much as he has anything else.

And I don't say that as a ding. That's pretty impressive in and of itself. But you just cannot take this entire thing and give it to Ryan Johnson because then he's done it and it may have, you know, and we may say, oh, these movies are good or these movies are bad. but the real question is, are these movies justifying the $4 billion price tag? That's the only question that really matters behind all this. But maybe the tension from this comes from the idea that Star Wars was ultimately the creation of George Lucas. Right. So there was a degree of authorship. There were a lot of people. Obviously, he only directed one of the original trilogy. He had a ton of really wonderful collaborators on those first three films.

but for the first six of these movies, George Lucas was the central creative hub for them. And the reason why the MCU works is because there is no one thing that is Marvel. You could call Stanley the avatar of it. You could call Jack Kirby the imagination of it, whatever you want to do. There are certain ideas that original Marvel writers came up with. But ultimately, for as much as we talk about Kevin Feigy, it does feel like the authorship of the,

authorship of those Marvel movies is equally distributed and contained in each one of their little boxes so that Scott Derrickson can make a weird Dr. Strange movie and it won't cripple the rest of what's happening. And I don't know that that works with Star Wars like you're saying. I don't know that you can make Star Wars by committee. Let me let me take it a step further and let me let me just reframe this as Burlington, Vermont, circa in 1985, and just say this idea of a central author of

something does not work with modern advanced global capitalism. It does not. Because here's the truth of accepting Star Wars as the vision of this guy. The truth is this guy had a lot of wild and cool ideas and pulled off

something artistic and risky and strange at the time, and he made arguably two and a half really, really good movies, maybe even all good movies, who cares? And then, 20 years later, he made three really, really bad movies, but it was the same guy. And within that, you're

having too much of a variance of quality to fully invest in. So instead, it doesn't become an artistic product of one person. It becomes this collective IP that is owned by shareholders and fans

and has to be tended to, like creatures in an exotic zoo, right, carefully and pumped full of the right hormones and antibiotics to be kept at the correct temperature to exist and to continue to exist, but not to experience highs that are too high or lows that are too low because it'll unsettle the entire thing. So you've amped up the planets and the aliens, but you've taken the humanity away, and this is where we are. A couple of questions to end our conversation here, because I know you've got to go. And I'm sure we'll talk about this again. And I would love to talk about it with more people out there and see what

they're thinking. I think the original, like, sort of, you know, you and I had talked about, we saw it last week. We talked about doing the podcast almost immediately. And it was almost like, let's take a day to kind decompress. And then another wave of people I knew saw it and were like, holy shit. But do you think there is a good movie inside this movie? No. I don't think, I just simply don't think it was possible. I think that you, I don't know how you make a good movie when you're picking, I mean, I was thinking about this analogy recently, and I think it only works for people who watch Top Chef. But on Top Chef, there is a challenge that comes back,

usually every season at least once in a quick fire, in which they're divided into teams, and the three members of the team are blindfolded, while one member of the team starts a meal and then a buzzer rings and someone else swaps in. And it's to be like, well, it looks like he was searing this lobo foie gras and deglazing these carrots. but I think that's a codfish and then does something else.

And then ding, the next person comes in, right? And if you do that, but you also have these ingredients that make no sense and were bought at different times. So some have possibly expired in different markets, in different countries. And then the goal is to make something that everyone in the world will find delicious. No, you cannot accomplish that. And I think a delicious meal is the right analogy to a good movie. and there was no way to make that.

You could make other things, but you couldn't make that. I don't think that they went about this in the right way, ultimately. I don't think you can make a trilogy of films or a series of films where you don't know really what the story is you're trying to tell. I'm not going to get into whether or not George Lucas knew everything that he was going to do in Empire and Jedi at the end of New Hope, but he gave himself the space, I don't mean space, like, the amount of time in between movies.

I mean, there was enough room to maneuver within those movies so that he could make those decisions. And I think ultimately, he had a vision of what that galaxy looked like, what the two poles of that galaxy were in terms of good and evil, and where these characters fit in along that spectrum. And I think ultimately what these movies did wrong was not consider that stuff because they didn't want to finish this. They don't want to finish this.

They don't actually want to destroy the first or final or whatever order there is because they need that thing out there to create more heroes. And they're going to come up with something else. Maybe they'll go ahead 10, 15 years in the future past these movies the next time there's a Ryan Johnson or a Kevin Feige movie. But I don't think that you can tell a story like this without some kind of more coherent plan. you know, for as much as you can read between the lines in these interviews about why Colin Trevereaux didn't do this, why Ryan Johnson did do that, why J.J. Abrams wasn't able

to make Last Jedi or whatever, what the plan was along the way. And really, I think ultimately, and I really don't mean to be distasteful at all, I think a lot of this movie, obviously, emotionally is supposed to hinge on Princess Leia. I mean, that is sort of, part of the problem here. And it's just, it's absent. And with all due respect to Carrie Fisher, where I thought it was a remarkable human being. But like, I don't think that her character,

her character was given a lovely send-off in The Last Jedi and was brought back in, in this film to carry too much weight, I think. I mean, do you agree with me about that? I found the whole thing pretty distasteful. You know, it was a bummer. Again, it also requires a deep, understanding and a deep placing of importance on the story around the story. Because if you were

living in some sort of vacuum and you didn't pay any attention, if you were a new critic from the 19th century and you only cared about the text and you watched this movie and you didn't know who Carrie Fisher was and you didn't know that she died, you'd think, what are these scenes? Why are they wouldn't? Why don't they make sense? Why does this character who everyone speaks about reverentially, fulfill her final mission out of nowhere and tap her son on the shoulder

so that he can be stabbed in the stomach and then be brought back to life and then she can die. Why? I'm sorry to ask those questions, but one has to. The only answer is because the fans, Kevin Smith, clapping next to us, worship this character and they wanted more

of it. And so dutifully, J.J. Abrams and Chris Tario put on, you know, put on their mining helmets and went down into the story mines and did a damn yeoman job, right, to make it kind of almost work. But the question should be the reason we're doing it in the first place. But no one was going to ask that question. It felt inevitable, because again, fandom is, quote unquote fandom is driving this. We demand more of this. We weren't satisfied with that. So we want more. And then you have that very strange flashback at the very end where it's young Mark Hamel and young Leia and you realize they didn't need her

at all. And we're getting closer to that, right? They could have just made them, they can make that movie. And I'm sorry to say it, they probably will. And that movie may end up even being a better movie than this one. But it's a movie with cartoon young Luke, but not cartoon and young Leah just training each other. We're closer and closer to that. And this movie ultimately, I think, will exist in some uncanny valley between the times when we weren't sure if we could or should do that to the times when, duh, of course, everyone's going to. What an appropriately terrifying note to end on. Yeah, I mean, my real final review to both reanimating people who have died and also

reanimating franchises that maybe should have been left alone is to quote the great Owen Wilson and the Royal Tenen bombs is what my take presupposes is, what if they didn't? Like, what if we just didn't do this? You know that that's not. But we have to operate from a position where that's not an option. I know. I mean, I think that we have to assume, because my last question was, can you even in your mind right now, because this is the question I've been asking myself over the last couple days, think of where you want this to go next? I don't think I'm along for the ride.

Honestly, I don't. I mean, this sounds so pedestrian, but I think it's the only answer is I would love them to make a movie sit in this universe when they had a reason to make a movie, not a release date. that's simply it. And we've had plenty of evidence over the last few years that people can make good movies or good TV shows out of almost anything,

things that shouldn't work at all, right? That we were extremely dubious about, whether it was Noah Hawley doing Fargo or, you know, or Thor as a viable, comedic movie star character. Guardians of the Galaxy, yes. Guardians of the Galaxy.

Like, you can do this. If you approach it for a place of, yeah, I'm going to make a, I'm going to, I have a good story to tell here. You can do it. And we have plenty of examples. And I wish that everyone could, maybe this is my message for the holiday season. I wish everyone involved with Star Wars and Lucasfilm could chill out. And maybe they can now, you know, maybe these quotes are telling. Yeah. All right, man. Well, to all of our listeners to you, to Kaya, happy holidays will be, I think, I think this is it for the week. I'm pretty sure, but we can, we'll figure that out later. But in any case, thanks for listening this year to The Watch. I hope everybody enjoyed the best of the decade pod. I hope everybody enjoyed the pods this year. We love doing it for you guys. And we can't wait to come back in 2020 and do more.

And let me just quick, quick direction change from the lump of coal we just delivered to everyone. We love doing this podcast so much. And I really have to say, Chris isn't here to get mad at me for doing it. I really want to thank Chris and Kaya for keeping this podcast going when I was in Albuquerque. making TV show, I'm so glad that we get to keep doing it. That was really kind of you guys, and we're not quitting anytime soon. Okay. We're not, unlike Disney and Star Wars, we shouldn't quit. That's your final verdict? Although maybe we go offline and we could talk about that email I got from

Juliet that was like, The Watch Thursdays has been permanently removed from your calendar. It's like, that was savage. And I think it was just some ICAL magnets, but I was like, wow, this is cold-blooded. we can talk offline about it Andy thanks so much for doing this I hope people I hope people enjoy their holidays and if you like Star Wars

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