Top 18 Bad Star Wars Feelings and Opinions, Now That It’s No Longer Star Wars Day

Yesterday, as it has been every May the 4th for decades, was Star Wars Day. Everybody appears to have had their fun and joy, celebrating and joking about one of popular culture’s longest-standing, most popular, and most influential juggernauts. If this franchise–this entity–were a building, it would undoubtedly be hailed as the Eighth Wonder of the World.

But that was yesterday. Today is May 5, and that means Star Wars Day is over. So now that I’ve done my part to Let People Enjoy Things, as a considerate member of society ought to do, by holding my tongue, I am compelled to vent: There was a time when I liked or at least appreciated the “May the Fourth be with you” pun play and the merriment that everyone brings to it, but now? I cannot stand it. This day drives me up the fucking wall.

There’s no way to justify it, not that I really care to do that in the first place. The reality, laid plain and bare, is that my annoyance at this faux-holiday is a direct function of my spoiled, soured attitude towards this whole Star Wars thing. I saw those VHS tapes of the original trilogy as a kid and thereby thought of Star Wars positively, in the same way that one would think of breathing positively; it was an omnipresent fact of life. I even actively liked Star Wars as a conscientious adult with opinions of my own, starting with The Force Awakens. But some real horseshit has happened in, and around, the whole franchise over the last few years that has effectively stripped away any good emotion I’ve ever felt towards it.

Thus, reflecting on yesterday, I’m going to engage in a little bloodletting. Here is an incomplete, non-comprehensive list of shitty opinions that I have about Star Wars, with special emphasis on how it has existed and evolved over the last six years. It is immature, it is unreasonable, it is all wholly genuine, I’m not out to convince anybody to see things my way, and I do not feel like explaining myself.

Alright, I’ve laid out all my cards, so let’s gooooooooo.

1. I really liked The Last Jedi. It was messy, it was uneven, it didn’t hit every shot that it took. But godDAMN did it swing for the rafters, its actual hits were plentiful enough and deeply rewarding, it cracked the space of possibilities for what a Star War could be wide open by smartly breaking all of the right rules, and it just plain ruled.
2. I really REALLY liked–maybe even loved–The Force Awakens. It took the platonic, mythic ideal of what everyone collectively agreed that “classic Star Wars” felt like, then distilled those nebulous ideas and moods and manifested them into a concrete, real film. I had vague, indistinct impressions of Star Wars being this purely magical thing when I was a dumb little kid, but The Force Awakens was the moment that I could vividly, clearly see and hear that.
3. Even my wife (then my girlfriend), who had virtually no preexisting sentimental attachment whatsoever to Star Wars, liked The Force Awakens to the point of later pursuing the original three movies on her own time. She wishes it to be known that she liked it almost as much as Baby Yoda using the force!!
4. I intensely disliked The Rise of Skywalker. It started off strong for like 10 to 15 minutes, but after that point, it seriously dragged and plodded along, and then it failed horrendously as a conclusion to the previous movies’ overarching story. Is there a better way than “This dude BEHIND ‘the dude behind the curtain’ was pulling all the neo-fascist strings all along!” to piss away every ounce of allegorical and thematic weight you amassed? Or how about going ultimately nowhere satisfying or interesting with the vast majority of these characters once we’ve reached story’s end?
5. I felt ownership for the “Sequel Trilogy” as a 25-year-old young adult in a way that I very much did not feel for the “Original Trilogy” or the “Prequel Trilogy” as a kid. So it sucked especially hard bearing witness to it being so overwhelmingly shit upon starting with the culture wars that sprang up around The Last Jedi. The moment that we collectively rejected the chaotic, anything-could-happen energy that that movie brought to the table–irreversibly tainted by and tangled into a whole boatload of racist, sexist, and broadly reactionary and bad-faith invective that became impossible to separate from all the other criticism–definitively worsened the culture.
6. Not that I was ever a die-hard fan of Star Wars, but after that shit? Which happened during that brief three to four-year moment when I cared and had substantial affection for the series? Well, these days, I’m even less of a fan than I ever was in the past. I’ve lost a bunch of respect for the institution, and it’s probably never going to come back.
7. Yes, I’m fucking bitter.
8. This is opinion, not objective fact…but HOLY SHIT, Rogue One and Solo are not better Star Wars movies than (the good movies in) the Sequel Trilogy. I’ve got parents that hold to this belief!! They are wrong.

9. Rogue One sucks. Its establishment of tone and setting of ambiance are always incomplete; for all of the 21st century high-fidelity renderings of Original Trilogy iconography, never has a Star Wars movie felt less Star Wars to me than it does here. It’s an attempt at styling itself as a serious war movie that never fully comes together. It tries and fails to weave in obvious platitudes and appeals to hope between the gritty war shit. It is not remotely convincing, and all it does is get in the way.
10. Rogue One is also functionally a clumsy self-insert fan fiction whose tie-ins and cameos to the wider Star Wars timeline are utter cringe. Especially when the scale of the climactic conflict in this Star Wars side story suddenly hugely grows to suspension of disbelief-breaking proportions. And EVEN MORESO ESPECIALLY when it ends at almost the literal moment when the original Star Wars (Episode IV) begins.
11. Seriously, how did Rogue One become everyone’s idea of a “return to form” for Star Wars when comparing it to The Force Awakens?!
12. Yes, I’m making myself more irrationally annoyed the more I write about this one single film, so I’m gonna stop here with that. Moving on!
13. I had a good time with Solo! A most pleasant surprise, considering that I was expecting the exact opposite going into it…particularly after being sour on Rogue One. Not automatically the same thing as being on the same level as mainline Star Wars when it’s good (it’s not), and it’s still the single most unnecessary film in the whole canon thus far, but ultimately? My biggest assumptions about its quality were wrong, and I’m happy about that.
14. I got three episodes into The Mandalorian, and I just do not care about it in the way that everyone else seems to. It’s decent, it’s competent, sure. But it’s not been actually good thus far, and I’ve not got the inclination to continue it; Baby Yoda alone cannot be motivation! I guess it’s supposed to get better as it goes on?

15. But even if that’s indeed true, I’m also hearing that as The Mandalorian progresses, it’s being used as the springboard for backdoor pilots and/or cameos for Boba Fett, and whoever Ahsoka is, and young Luke apparently shows up at second season’s end, and who knows what other Lore Things™ they’re putting in?? That kind of attention to side shit is just not interesting to me. At least when it pertains to Star Wars.
16. So the meme/the consensus lately is that the stewards driving The Mandalorian have “saved” the whole Star Wars enterprise after the wreck that The Last Jedi and The Rise of Skywalker left it in? All I can say to that, then, is wowww. Three cheers for all-encompassing mediocrity.
17. Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order is a holistically frustrating game. Maybe it’s just not for me, who knows. But I genuinely enjoyed Bloodborne, with which Fallen Order shares plenty of that Soulsborne DNA, all the way up to hitting a brick wall of difficulty so great that it stopped me in my tracks. Yet Bloodborne had the good graces to still be fun even right at that brick wall! Meanwhile, Fallen Order was not fun even once! What’s it doing so differently from Bloodborne that it stopped being my bag?
18. SO. MANY. SHOWS. AND. MOVIES. In the foreseeable future. WHY???

That’s it, I’m done. Venting over. My top 18 Star Wars opinions that I could think up this very moment, everybody.

That was fun. Maybe not for anyone reading it, but definitely for me! Ping me if you want to read me bitch and moan about Evangelion!!