After 40 years, the last flickering embers of a fire that started in the hearts of children in a crappy monoaural movie theater in 1977 and weathered the storms of injurious experience that tempered them into the bitter adults that watched the world go back to Hell by making their mistakes all over again, finally died in front of an IMAX depiction of Luke Skywalker telling them that the stories they had in their head - that rich inner fantasy life that probably sustained them when all else let them down - were stupid, and then Luke fell off a toilet and died, just like they probably would.
As always I get a kick out of your witty wordery Prof, but you know you're describing me there, to a tee; yet my reaction to TLJ was the complete opposite.
I saw a hero who had lost everything through his own weakness, railing against what he once believed, convinced the universe was better off without him; then at the end found the strength to stand up again, confront evil in his unique non-violent way, and pass on the new hope he had once embodied. What I saw was that -
for once - all the stories I'd made up in my head weren't as good as the one I saw on the screen. If TLJ did nothing else for me, it would still have given me that.
I do get the reaction to being told that you are wrong/a bad person/not a fan for not loving a film (especially when there is the strong suggestion of corporate malfeasance being behind it), but equally the internet tells me almost daily that I'm not a 'true fan' for thinking it's the best SW film since Jedi.
We rewatched all the SW flicks and the Tartakovsky series in 'chronological order' over the last few weeks, ending up with TFA tonight, in preparation for the TLJ Blu-Ray. The prequels started off fun, and I was surprised to find I can now enjoy the more appallingly bad scenes quite a bit, but I still find the last quarter of RotS to virtually unwatchable.
More surprisingly, I found that my enjoyment of TFA has been greatly improved by TLJ, the over-familiar super-weapon desert-planet rebel-base elements now feeling pleasantly nostalgic in the light of the knowledge that all this comfort food will soon be swept away, and the characters all the more interesting for the awareness of where they are heading. An accusation often levelled at TLJ is that it ignores or dismisses all the groundwork laid by TFA - far from it, I think it elevates those elements by recasting them as the starting points of a more ambitious story.
