No, 'Star Wars'
Isn't Failing Because Of Hateful Trolls. It's Failing Because Kathleen Kennedy
Has Done A Garbage Job.
ByBen Shapiro
@benshapiro
June 11, 2018
On Monday, former Hollywood Reporter editor Marc
Bernardin took it upon himself to explain the ongoing failure of the new Star
Wars lineup to set the world aflame. His answer: the fans are the problem.
Calling your audience a bunch of deplorables didn’t work
well for Hillary Clinton; it’s not going to work well for Disney, either. But
that didn’t stop Bernardin from laying all the blame for Star Wars’
failures not at the feet of studio head Kathleen Kennedy but at the feet of the
“toxic fandom.” According to Bernardin, it’s a series of internet trolls who
have destroyed Star Wars’ luster and caused the newest film in the
canon, Solo, to bomb. That problem started not with The Force Awakens,
but with The Last Jedi. These toxic fans, Bernardin writes:
Hated everything it stood for. Hated what they saw as a
social justice warrior remix of the Star Wars they grew up with. And
they hated Tran’s Rose most of all because they decided that she was the avatar
for all that was wrong with the franchise. Those fans — a minority but a loud
one — found their “them” in the very thing they used to love. Those who chose
this particular vein of the Dark Side, emboldened by the faceless intoxication
of the internet, went hard on Tran. Racist invective, misogyny, rape and death
threats all hurled at her constantly, unrelentingly, transforming what had been
a Cinderella story — The Last Jedi was Tran’s first major film — into a
modern-day nightmare.
Now, let it be known that it’s absolutely revolting to
attack an actress because you didn’t like her part in a movie. That’s absurd.
And bigotry of any sort is disgusting. But it’s not the faceless Reddit trolls
who killed Star Wars. That’s why Bernardin struggles to explain his
preposterous theory:
But if The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi were
too progressive for some fans, why didn’t they comfort themselves in the warm
blanket of Solo, co-written by Star Wars standard-bearer Lawrence
Kasdan and directed by Lucas’ Willow collaborator Ron Howard? It
should’ve been everything they wanted in the prequels they didn’t get, without
the “too many ladies and people of color” issues they claimed hurt the new
films. But judging by the gross, they didn’t want Solo either. What is Star
Wars fandom against? Turns out, the answer: itself. Or, rather, the
realization that Star Wars is and always has been for children, and they
aren’t children any more.
Yes, the fans just don’t get it. Don’t listen to those
stupid fans. You know, the ones who actually show up for the films. The ones
who buy all the gear and have John Williams’ soundtrack on loop in their cars.
The ones who introduce their two-year-olds to the Imperial March (guilty).
Why all this effort to blame the fans for the series’
troubles? Because we must never – ever, under any circumstances – blame
Kathleen Kennedy. Kennedy, you see, is woke. The Lucasfilm story group is
entirely female. Their goal, according to The New York Times:
“They wanted to tell beautiful stories, fulfill the expectations of loyal fans
and create meaningful female characters.” The Times gushes, “Today, the
Lucasfilm story group is a diverse outlier in Hollywood: five of its members
are people of color, and the team includes four women and seven men. … A new,
unpublished analysis of Star Wars films shows striking progress in their
representation of gender and race.”
Now, Kennedy could have had these priorities and created
good movies. Instead, she didn’t. She created a bunch of goop. The Force
Awakens is garbage; The Last Jedi is double-garbage. That’s because
Kennedy had two choices upon being granted the helm of the Star Wars universe:
(1) fast-forward fifty years, beyond the original characters, and reboot,
losing the nostalgia of the original characters but gaining freshness; (2) recast
the original characters and pick up where Return of the Jedi left off.
Instead, in fully risk averse fashion, she chose door (3): leech off the
nostalgia while introducing new characters a few years in the future. This led
her to the idiotic decision to murder off all the original beloved characters
in increasingly stupid fashion — and then to the doubly idiotic decision to go
back and create new movies around those now-dead characters. She pissed off all
of us who grew up on Star Wars, and in doing so, destroyed whatever good
will existed among us for the newer batch of characters. Solo and Rogue
One are good movies — but Han Solo was killed by JJ Abrams in The Force
Awakens after being turned into a loser drifting around the galaxy in his
iconic Millenium Falcon, the equivalent of a deadbeat dad who abandoned his
family in the 1970s to trek the country in his bug van; Rogue One revolved
around a set of characters who all die.
And then even the new movies were chained to the most
risk averse strategy: instead of teaming Rey up with Kylo Ren (the only moment
of The Last Jedi anyone liked) or killing off Finn for effect, Kennedy’s
team saved Finn and essentially rebooted the series to Episode IV by
splitting Kylo and Rey. All the SJW antics of the new stuff (from Solo’s
odd droid-rights narrative to The Last Jedi’s class warfare-animal
rights jaunt) are ancillary to the fact that Kennedy has wildly botched the
landing on Star Wars.
But she must be saved.
Thus the audience must be blamed. That’s why we’ve seen a
spate of articles in the last week attempting to defend Kennedy’s garbage
record (see here,
here, and here, for example).
Kelly Tran’s hateful trolls are hateful trolls. But
they’re not the reason this series has run off the rails.
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