Ridiculous Opinions #201
Yesterday I wasn’t feeling too hot, so after school, I came home and laid on the bed, watching a documentary called The Director and the Jedi. The film is about the making of the 8th Star Wars film called The Last Jedi. It was written and directed by Rian Johnson, who had mainly made independent films prior to that, including Brick and the odd, time-travel movie, Looper.
As some of you are sure to point out, The Last Jedi is widely loathed amongst Star Wars fandom, as it was considered to be poorly-written and to have destroyed the continuity of the Star Wars movies. Upon first viewing, I actually liked the movie. I thought it was intelligent, thoughtful, and an interesting way to move the series forward. There were some clunky bits, but as a whole, I thought it was well done. Subsequent viewings made me reevaluate my opinion. The clunky bits stood out even more, and the good bits didn’t seem to be as good as I thought they were.
But now, I am reevaluating my opinion yet again. When I think back to the movie, I think about some very compelling visuals and a thoughtful approach to the movie. Rian Johnson is loathed for the film, but he made the movie with a tremendous amount of respect for the material and I think he genuinely tried to push the story forward. It was a difficult job.
I really liked The Force Awakens, but the truth of the matter is that J.J. Abrams just remade the original Star Wars movie. It was pretty much a beat-for-beat remake, with lots of mysteries to be solved, but very little in the way of new ground being broken.
The Last Jedi was not like that. They weren’t retreading the past. Johnson was trying to blaze new ground as a storyteller, but when you’re messing with fandom, that’s a huge mistake. When you’ve been a fan of Star Wars for decades, you don’t want to see anything new on the big screen. You want to see the same old crap. You want to experience the same feelings that you had when you first went into the theater and were wowed by the endless imagination that was involved in its creation. All you want is for someone to recreate that feeling.
But that comes with diminishing returns. The Force Awakens tried to do that. Some people loved it. Some people didn’t. The Last Jedi tried to blaze new ground and only ended up angering people all over the place. But Johnson knew this was going to happen, and he said so in his script:
All of this got me to thinking about a few things; one of which is: Why we are afraid of change?
Everyone is scared of change. That’s pretty understandable. Change can be a difficult prospect. We spend a great deal of our existence making our lives comfortable. We nest in our houses; building them into something cozy and familiar; a refuge that we go to over and over again. We go back to the same entertainment; we watch the same television shows, even if they’re bad; we listen to the same bands, even when they’ve gone past their sell-by date; we watch the same movie stars over and over again, even when we know that they no longer have what it takes to make good movies. We drive the same route to work every day, take vacations in the same spots, hate when our favorite players get traded from our favorite teams, and have the same go-to meal when we need to be comforted.
All of these things are understandable, but they prevent our growth as human beings. When I was younger, I had a theory about change. The theory was that, at some point in everyone’s life, they stop. That’s it. They just stop. They’ve achieved all they want to achieve. They’ve done everything that they want to do. Maybe they’re comfortable in their lives as they are and they don’t need to go any further. Perhaps they’ve reached the highest echelons of what they are able to do from a financial perspective. Whatever way you look at it, they no longer accept change, and in some cases, actively avoid it.
And everyone reaches this moment at different points in their lives. Take a look around at the people you know. Have they stopped? I know some people that stopped when they were eighteen-years old and I know some that continue to embrace change well into their retirement years. The key here is that everyone is going to stop at some point or another.
So, when The Last Jedi comes along and everyone gets pissed off at it, what they’re pissed off about is change. In The Director and the Jedi, Mark Hamill (who played Luke Skywalker) professes his anger and annoyance at the way Rian Johnson treated his character. Both he and the world of fandom wanted Luke Skywalker to remain the same. “He’s a hero,” they said. “Why would you make him like this?” They were afraid of change. They wanted him to be the same forever.
I’m no guru when it comes to this. I love to eat the same meals every day. I drive the same route to work each morning. I have listened to U2 religiously since I was fifteen years old. I hate change just as much as the rest of you.
But I don’t want to hate change. I want to embrace it. As much as I hate it, I want to try new things every once in a while. I want to live in new countries, see things that I’ve never seen before, and talk to people that are fascinating. Unfortunately, the older I get, the harder it gets to embrace that change.
“What’s your point, Randall?”
I guess my point as a whole in writing this is to simply remind myself that I don’t want to fear change. I’m writing this more to myself than anyone else, because I want to continue to try new things. That can be hard for me. Since Covid, I have become a bit of a hermit; a curmudgeon who scoffs and turns up his nose at the things around me.
But somewhere inside me is the same adventurous young man that went to China in 1997. Somewhere inside me is the same guy who moved his family to Ghana in 2006 and Bangladesh in 2014 and the U.A.E. in 2017. There’s an adventurer lurking in here somewhere; I just have to remind myself that he’s there.
So the moral of this story is embrace change, even if it’s small. Go out and try something new today. Go try an interesting new meal. Take a different route when you walk around the block. Talk to that person that you never had the guts to talk to. Move to that country that you always wanted to live in.
Better yet, go watch The Last Jedi and embrace that film for all of the changes it made to the Star Wars universe. We all know how it turned out when they tried to undo all of those changes.
No need to go backwards.
Only forwards.
