Anger Leads To Hate

Facebook  |  Twitter  |  Podcasts

You all remember Rose from the previous Star Wars movie right? She was the character that taught one of our main heroes why kindness is so important and why love is more powerful than hate. She was endearingly played by the actress Kelly Marie Tran who then went on to receive so much racist abuse for having appeared in the movie that she had to delete all of her social media accounts to get away from it. Well, you cunts will be happy to know that she's barely in this new movie. You won. Every online prick that derided The Last Jedi for daring to be original, to dodge cliché, and to be fresh, has gotten their own fucking way. And don't give me any of that shit about you being fans and that you simply knew better than the previous writer and director because you can absolutely get fucked on that one. I've been obsessed with Star Wars since I was seven years old and I'll hands down challenge any of you motherfuckers to a Star Wars-off without even breaking a fucking sweat. I live, breathe, and sleep Star Wars to the point that I accidentally had my very first wank whilst I was lying in bed as a kid and using my dick as a joystick to fly my imaginary X-Wing on what turned out to be a particularly turbulent assault on the Death Star. What an explosive ending that turned out to be. Do you know the master-cheat to the N64's Star Wars: Podracer? Because not only do I still remember it, RRTANGENTABACUS, but I have that shit constantly repeating in my head like I'm being hounded by a dyslexic force ghost with fucking Tourette's. 

Subscribe to the podcast!

Star Wars: The Rise Of Skywalker is what happens when you try to write a script around the mad online demands of an incoherent mob with the result being that it doesn't make a fucking lick of sense. If there was any justice in this piece of shit world then the opening crawl to this movie would have read, “Star Wars: Episode 9 - The Rise Of Skywalker, Rose wakes up in her bed. The previous movies were all a dream. She's the only character that's real. Get fucked, losers....” As things stand I happen to love The Last Jedi and so the fact that this movie does everything it possibly can to undo the narrative path and message of its predecessor is pretty fucking annoying. But the fact that it does so to please the worst kinds of racists, misogynists, and cowardly anonymous bullies is more or less unforgivable. This is a franchise that should provide hope to those that feel like they're fighting a losing battle and instead it's decided to suck on the balls of their oppressors. Let's say for the sake of argument that none of that bothered me though, The Rise Of Skywalker would still be a total fucking mess in the way that it can't even keep track of its own fucking bullshit. This movie had two writers and I'm honestly shocked to discover that neither was a confused toddler scribbling over the walls with crayon and excrement as it recovered from a fucking head injury. Usually, the credits are a list of people that worked on a film but here it's more like a list of people that simply chose not to ask, “wait, what the fuck is going on in this movie?”

The Rise Of Skywalker might seem to be going out of its way to piss all over the decisions of the infinitely superior The Last Jedi but I almost can't be mad about that because of how constantly it also seems to undermine itself at the same time. I have no idea about the writing process here but from the final product, I'd guess that each writer shouted out the next word of the script having paid almost zero attention to the word given beforehand. At one point a major character is killed off but before you have a chance to worry or mourn for them, they're instantly brought back for no obvious reason at all. Another, different, major character is permanently and rather casually killed off a few scenes later only to have their killer then go on to walk the same narrative path that they were currently on. So essentially the filmmakers decided to replace a character that we were familiar with for a new one that we have no emotional investment in at all. This happens again and again with the movie attempting to get around these shallow fake-outs by moving at such an insane speed that almost nothing can register. Another new character is introduced, tries to kill a main character, decides to help them instead, explains their backstory, offers up a trinket that will aid our heroes, and then isn't seen again until the final hour. That all takes place over about five fucking minutes. If there were two writers (and honestly I'm struggling to believe there was even fucking one) then I can only assume that they wrote this film about three hours before the deadline whilst panic snorting so much cocaine that their office would have looked like the fucking wastelands of Hoth.

The Rise Of Skywalker isn't so much a movie as it is a flick-book of images that you might recognise as looking slightly similar to those you've experienced in the previous instalments. Some of those images are pretty cool too, but it comes at the expense of almost everything else that you could want from a film whether it be character or any sense of cohesion. If Star Wars was a chocolate cake then this film is what happens when you eat it too fast and you have to spray it all back up the wall in a toxic display of high-pressure diarrhoea. The characters run from one McGuffin to the next like they're playing an intergalactic game of Supermarket Sweep whilst shouting nothing more substantial than indecipherable exposition. At one point they scream the word Exegol which sounds to me like the perfect name for a surgically removed bollock. A little later we're introduced to an alien named Babu Frik who I also swear to God was being referred to throughout as Gobble Prick. I've genuinely never felt so battered around the head by a movie in my life as it wipes between scenes so quickly that you'd think they'd hired Steven Seagal to keep the fucking camera lens clean. Why is Emperor Palpatine back? I mean I know why he's back. It's because the previous film killed off his replacement Snoke before this new trilogy could become an exact copy of the original one. But why is he back in terms of the world of the film? Is he a clone? Is he a zombie? Because throughout this entire movie he simply just looked like a crusty old dressing gown that was hanging on the back of a fucking bedroom door. 

Without trying to make this too personal I think it's becoming obvious that writer-director J.J Abrams is a little bit of a hack. I love his The Force Awakens but it's nothing more than a nostalgic wank-fest that serves to set up a series more so than it does present us with anything new or of substance. This is more or less true of all of his other films too from Mission: Impossible 3 to the Star Trek reboot. It works brilliantly for a first new instalment by bringing back fans of the original franchise whilst providing an easy jumping in point for potential new ones. But as soon as he's asked to start delivering on those earlier promises you can see Abrams skills as a storyteller fall like a house of cards behind an Olympic level farter. Even his TV show Lost had a promising start before meandering off into its convoluted and anti-climatic finale. In terms of creativity, he's the filmmaking equivalent of a long wank that's concluded with a punch to the balls. But in a bad way. He's talked recently about how he wanted The Rise Of Skywalker to be a conclusion to all eight previous films in the series but then just look at what he's ended up at. Without spoiling too much or going into specifics it's more or less an identical final thirty minutes to The Return Of The Jedi which makes this whole journey feel a little bit pointless. We've had an entirely new trilogy and the best Abrams could think to do is to bring us to the same conclusion that we'd reached three films ago. You can practically hear every gear crunch as he frantically tries to get off the path of originality laid out by The Last Jedi and back onto the familiar ground of the story we've had before. To quote the Emperor and in terms of this film, “Everything is proceeding as I have foreseen”. Thanks for reading, motherfuckers, and see you next time.