Today, on the evening news, there
was a report that some of Hasbro’s sales were down and that analysts are
blaming it on “tie-in fatigue.” The story went on to unbox a convoluted
explanation about fans being fatigued over too many tie ins.
I thought this was an attempt
at adaptive justification for something that has a much simpler explanation. I will explain using the The Last Jedi.
Well, there are more than enough
fan reviews, chat boards and professional movie critiques presenting endless
opinions about what worked and what didn’t in the movie, so I thought that I
would do something different. I would review the movie from a Meta-story point
of view.
In other words, how did the movie
and narrative work from a franchise-driving stand point.
I’m not going to spend time
praising the things that we love about Star Wars (and there’s a lot of those in
this movie). Instead this critique will unbox those elements that are causing
the franchise to stumble from a broader commercial standpoint.
Warning!! Spoiler Alert!! Read no
further if you haven’t seen the movie and plan to.
Disaster on Rotten Tomatoes: When it first aired, the fan ratings
on Rotten Tomatoes were in the mid to low 60’s. Not great but not rotten…yet.
Over the following weeks, the more the audience showed up or thought more about
what they’d seen, the more the fan rating dropped. Big trouble! It should go up…
As of writing this, the number has hit 49%. Officially rotten!! What
happened?!!
Meta-story analysis: From a
Meta-story standpoint, this latest installment is declining at nourishing and
expanding itself as a franchise. It’s not some strange idea like “tie-in
fatigue.” It’s a problem with what’s happening with the narrative and the world
development. Here’s why:
A
responsibility to deliver enough newness: With big world properties that
live across multiple media and multiple sequels, prequels and timelines, it’s
important to give your existing fans and your new audience real surprises
and continual expansion of story, character and world.
Continual new human ideas need to flow through the story. Ideas that are useful for the new
changes your audience wants in their lives now and tomorrow. Those ideas are hard to craft well
but when done right, the audience wants to use them and the new visual elements
are one of the most profound ways the audiences owns those ideas and takes them
home to explore and expand on them. Rich new visuals also signal that the
franchise is moving forward.
Scant
newness: For a while now, the Star Wars saga has significantly
under-delivered on newness of world and elements within it. We travel to new
places but those places are often full of vehicles and things that feel very
tired, very “been there done that.”
Example: The newer, larger, walkers.
Just putting gorilla-style knuckles on what is largely the same design and same
gestalt We’ve seen in quite a few of the movies now, just feels old. Was this
done to employ much of the existing molds for the toy company? Where was the
visual imagination that could have delivered an exciting new take on these
dreadnaughts, a new visual idea that would use surprise to re-awaken that sense
of institutional and relentless power at our doorstep? We are 10 movies into the franchise after all...
Surprise opens the mind to faster and
deeper adoption of the ideas in the moment. Lack of surprise deadens that
adoption and then the audience invests less in the franchise.
Use the permission Luke!: In a
universe as vast as the Star Wars universe, with multitudes of alien races and
the vast timeframe to stretch across, this franchise should have full
permission to visually experiment and yet it seems bolted into its visual
canon. Where does this come from? There
are more than enough images, toys, collectibles, published stories, games and
beyond to enjoy the past visual work for generations yet to come. There’s no
need to treat this franchise’s past like it should define its future.
Re-invention and risk are critical to continual franchise health. Visually, this movie doesn’t rise to that
challenge.
Respecting
some Canon is very, very, important for your fans but too much can
be handcuffs for evolution or expansion. In big world properties, mythology
bloat is inevitable. Over time, the canon becomes so thick it stifles evolution
and it needs to be trimmed back from time to time. The devil is truly in the
details here. If you’re going to change canon through narrative repositioning,
or do a full on ret-con, how well you do it and what you replace it with had
better be truly excellent.
Off-hand discarding of Canon, or worse
still, badly conceived redefining of key elements to make them less important,
can backfire as it did in this movie. Change but change well.
Overly heavy canon is more like a long time valued employee whose time it is to retire.
The elements need to be moved from the story respectfully and with affection
versus rudely and uncharacteristically. Again, this movie did the latter (I’ll
explain where) and its just one of the ways it popped the audience right out of
the story.
Every time you disrupt or weaken the story, you weaken the connection of the
meaning and usefulness to the audience and this is what drives usage and
franchise success!!
Character
consistency: In Star Wars, we have literally grown up with the characters
as they’ve gone from young world hoppers to aged sages and galactic
institutions. That means we KNOW who they are as if they were family members.
The Last Jedi wrote behaviors for some of the most foundational characters of
the franchise that just don’t play as true and even betray some of the key
reasons we love them. Yes, there’s a Hollywood adage that goes something like
“kill the baby.” What is meant is that crafting great story often means giving
up something you hold precious in order to achieve the unexpected. What it
doesn’t mean is that long standing characters can be thrown away
unceremoniously.
Luke: Here is the character who
started it all. A flawed and naïve boy who grew to take on the greatest evil in
the galaxy and prevail because of goodness, heart and tenacity. Yes, there is human truth in disillusionment that can
come with age but, the motivation that would have been needed for Luke to
decide to kill a sleeping student was way outside of his character truth.
Additionally, the life we found him living was absurd and full of very
strange narrative choices that left the audience feeling creepy. Whose idea was
the unsettlingly cheesy sequence of milking a giant rubber lactating alien
walrus during one of his rants?
We invest in fictional heroes the same way we do in real heroes. We don’t
want to feel creepy or upset at behaviors that just don’t make sense for
someone we invest our beliefs in. You can’t unsee or unhear those things so you
can do real damage to your franchise. That doesn’t mean your characters and
heroes can’t go through gigantic ups and downs and swings from dark to light.
Doing it in ways that run counter to that character’s truth are the problem.
Yoda: His appearance in this
movie seemed only to be a device to burn the reliquary of the Jedi books. His
laughing and bizarrely joking demeanor at doing so with little setup or reason for being
in the story trivialized this beloved character who is the living and breathing
metaphor for the balance of the force. It was strange for a quirky character
whom, in the past, we’d come to deeply trust.
Chewie
– why was he even in the movie? He had no significant role as in past movies.
He was little more than a chauffeur. Utterly removable. This character has been
the franchise’s powerful metaphor for unquestioning loyalty and friendship,
Battlefield brotherhood and egoless strength. None of those beats were
serviced. What a terrible demotion. Like Luke, he was given a cringy sequence
when he was about to eat that cooked Porg. It smells of ewoks but with an attempt at creating a meme-worthy moment that didn't work.
Plot efficiency - When in doubt, leave it out: Characters or elements put into a story as a device to make certain plot
points happen are often the weakest characters and elements in the movie.
Broadly, the rule is to subtract these elements from the story and continually
tighten the narrative and the logic of how it all moves forward. This is
because characters with no depth or lacking any motivation that has been
credibly built, are characters we can’t connect to, we aren’t scared of, who
simply don’t move us. The more you have in a story, the flatter your story gets
and eventually, your audience leaves not knowing why they really didn’t care,
or worse still, didn’t like it.
Unfortunately, The Last Jedi was absolutely bursting with unneeded or under-motivated
character appearances. Additionally, so many of these characters had bits and
chads of set-up stories from previous movies that were either ignored in this
movie or when the payoff arrived, it was lightweight or trivial.
Supreme Leader Snoke: Here is a character that the story didn’t
invest in letting us get to know and therefore fear. He had virtually no
background, died in a surprisingly incompetent moment, but more importantly, he
was not a dangerous idea. Being just a Megalomaniac makes THE most boring bad guys. Great
bad guys actually have a viable and dangerous idea they represent. This idea is
usually of greatest threat to our central hero. In this movie, that idea was
Ben/Kylo Ren’s. That worked very well but then Snoke needed a deeper reason to exist.
Maz Kanata: An interesting
character lightly set up in The Force Awakens as being somehow involved in Luke
Skywalkers journey through the underground. What an interesting set up! We had no payoff of that set up
in this movie and only saw her in a desperate broadcast that was clearly just
to give us a push in the direction of a specific code breaker. Really
unnecessary and not terribly respectful of the setup previously given the
audience. Set ups are an immediate question that comes rushing back into the
audience’s head as soon as they see the character again. Instead all that
interest was spent on being merely expository…a plot device.
DJ (Benicio Del Toro): This
codebreaker was a character that I’ve heard a lot about since the movie aired.
Folks I’ve spoken to usually quirk an eyebrown and say something like “whats
with that guy?” In essence, another plot device to play a reversal/betrayal to
magnify the stakes during the battle with the last of the resistance. Because of the weight of that betrayal, the
character should have been built much deeper to carry it. As an example, how
much better would it have been if it were one of Rey’s parents whom had
abandoned her? (something that was yet another anti-climactic throw away moment
when revealed). Add to the weight on her shoulders and give her a real reason
for her crisis of belief rather than just some words from an evil guy.
Captain Phasma: Cool silver suit.
Always walking on during ominous music in these movies. No real back-story. No
real meaning or ideas…and then she’s dead by a miraculous come back from Finn
and we don’t even get to see the great actress we know is under the suit? A
real miss on all cylinders. You won’t sell more silver storm
troopers unless there’s a character reason that moves us to want them. As I write
this I worry that the next movie will see her not really dead but now hideously
scarred…and mad…and still no reason to exist in the story.
Rey in the pit beneath the island:
Nothing happened! Luke gave us a quick set up that the pit was strong with the
dark side and when she goes down into it against Luke’s warnings, nothing
understandable happens. No great metaphors, no foreshadowing that makes
powerful sense, nothing of consequence that has any real impact on the story.
Without this sequence the movie would not have changed one bit.
Looking for the codebreaker on the
gambling planet: this entire sequence seemed gratuitous and unnecessary
when crafting a character for profound betrayal could have, and should have,
come from within the closer circle of characters in the story. We had to endure
a seemingly impossible jaunt to an almost comically conceived of
vegas-on-redbull planet when it all could have been done tighter and with far
more painful and personal results. This one seemed a combination of plot
convenience and unmotivated world building. Great world building always means
each location is more than a host for the action. It is a new part of the
meaning of the story. Dagoba is where Luke finds the strength to commit to the
training…
Rules
of Magic: Magic always has to have rules and limitations. Harry Potter does
it so well and as a result, we feel the characters struggle to learn it, use
it, master it and ultimately succeed even in spite of it. The force is a form
of magic.
The Last Jedi just throws all of that out the window in exchange for the
concept of finding “extraordinariness” within yourself just when you need it
most. For me, this is perhaps one of the most disappointing takes of the more
recent Star Wars films. Luke, Darth, anyone and everyone who can use the force
in any capacity, have a long and profound journey to find it within themselves,
train in its use and control, and even learn how to use a light saber. This
takes a lifetime for most but at least several intensive years (and movies) for the deeply
gifted.
Rey: So now we have a hero who
never has to train and learn, who simply has the force grow and respond to her
exactly when she needs it. Lightsabers leap into her hand on command, amazing
skill in wielding it is automatic and even making enormously heavy rocks float
are all possible without significant training. What this does is undercut our
belief that she has achieved “worthiness.” We all know that exceptional is
something that takes a lot of very, very, hard work so including that truth is
critical to stories with any sort of magic or the magic becomes a form of
deus-ex-machina (a god that descends from heaven to fix whatever is wrong). In
essence, we are delivered a hero that is not useful to us as proof of an idea.
This makes all the business that flows from her and her experience far less
successful.
Leia and sudden manifestation of the
force: You can’t have the first and only time a character uses magic be a
moment the story turns on without some form of setup or foreshadowing. By
having Leia pull herself from the vacuum of space, back into an airlock, using
the force, when we have never seen her do so before is just that kind of
moment. Yes, she’s Luke’s sister. Yes, the rest of the writing for her was good
in this movie, but there was no cost or effort in the magic’s use and no real
meaning either. Consistent with this movie’s reoccurring mistake of not putting
narrative weight behind many of their choices. Again, doing a great job of
telling a story with inspiring, believable, human struggle, triumph and truth
is the foundation of sustaining a great heroic franchise.
Sacrificing good sustainable logic for
great moments: Weaponizing light
speed changes the entire struggle. I was
blown away at how cool the moment was when Admiral Holdo (Laura Dern) turned
her ship around and went suicide-lightspeed right into the First Order causing
unimaginable damage!
Then I began to think about what this does to the entire
series. It changes everything. Once you weaponized something of that much
power, everyone would use it…a lot! Get as many ships as you can and
robot-light speed them into the First Order strongholds and vice versa. No
ground war, just super powerful space missiles. I could almost guarantee that
the next movies won’t even address this but there it is.
Also feeding the boys business: In the
past, the Star Wars franchise has been a very broad-based, multi-generational
and dual gender phenomenon. I applaud leaning into equalized roles for male and
female actors in the new movies. About time!
That being said,
The Last Jedi has somewhat taken its eye off the ball when it comes to keeping
the boys business fed with heroic characters they want to inhabit as well.
This is important
because there’s a very big difference between what audience shows up for a
movie and who buys into all the play, game and lifestyle goods afterwards.
Male heroic model? So what male
characters in the movie can I really aspire to be in a major heroic way? Yet
again, Finn seems to only be in the story to be saved. Poe has potential but ultimately,
he’s used primarily for scaling the stakes of the movie through his frustration.
Luke…well we’ve talked about him. Net/net, there’s a very important discussion
for the next movies about finding and representing important, new, male-heroic
mythology that is thrilling and competitively aspirational.
There’s lots more to talk about but this blog post is already the longest
one I’ve ever posted.
In
closing:
It’s hard to hurt big, multi-generational franchises: There is a
great deal of evidence across other franchises that big, multi-generational
franchises can grow dramatically, reinvent the visual, and even get it wrong
and then get it right. This is important, because when a franchise delivers
gigantic sums of profit to it’s parent company and all the companies who pay a
lot to license that franchise, it can become too precious and second-guessing
can cause all kinds of decision-making that is unhealthy to the creative process
of shaping the next chapter in the story for an audience that is continually changing. There are ways to cope with these
pressures and I'll save that for another blog post.
The Star Wars franchise has
reached the point where I believe it needs to be carefully (and a little
dangerously) evolved for relevance and world-newness as well as tighter and
better structured character storytelling. I believe it’s all do-able and if it’s
done right, we can all forgive a stumble or two on our favorite epic mythology.
The upside for the franchise is still there but it’s not to be mined…it’s to be
reshaped.
