The State of Star Wars: “Put a chick in it, make it gay, and make it lame.”
Hell hath no fury…
Harvey Weinstein’s personal assistant strikes at the heart of Star Wars.
The problem with Disney Star Wars is the fact that they refuse to hire competent writers and filmmakers. There is no problem with making a story set in the Star Wars universe that has LGBTQ characters in it. In fact, that new angle would be refreshing. Disney Star Wars is creating stories that are completely devoid of any form of interesting storytelling narrative, character arcs/development, and cinematography. The quality would make a first-year film student blush. The amateurs are taking over Disney Star Wars and Kathleen Kennedy is a huge part of the problem.
South Park is never wrong. They’re just early.
The captain of a sunken ship is always to blame. Kathleen Kennedy’s mantra towards Star Wars has been, “The Force is Female,” and we have seen just how awful that sentiment has made Disney Star Wars. The Mandalorian is exempt because it was written by a competent and experienced filmmaker and screenwriter, Jon Favreau. He had a lot of help from veteran Disney Star Wars writer and director, Dave Filoni. As good as The Mandalorian was, the quality of storytelling has dropped significantly afterwards. The Book of Boba Fett was the first sign that Disney Star Wars was faltering. Obi-Wan then careened into a string of parked sand speeders, drunk off green tit milk; its path of destruction created a clear sign forward that Disney Star Wars was on the warpath to make male characters look weak and stupid, and female characters, no matter how poorly written, perfect.
We can see this in the character of young princess Lea in Obi-Wan. She knows how to handle herself in any situation, no matter how new the scenario might be. Re-programming security droids or doors on the fly? No problem. Age is just a number. We saw this again in Reva, one of the Inquisitors from the same series. The actress who plays her is excellent outside of Disney Star Wars, but within, she is given terrible lines and nonsensical character development and a lackluster arc. What happened after the first two seasons of The Mandalorian is clear — Disney does not know how to write compelling story narratives, regardless of gender, race, or age. The showrunners for The Acolyte are no different; in fact, they are somehow worse.
George Lucas had one rule when creating Star Wars on the big screen: nothing on set is to resemble anything earthly. Han Solo fixes the Millenium Falcon, not with a wrench, but with esoteric tools whose functionality and application are unknown to the viewer and remain so. Great science fiction movies dance on the edge of alien and familiar. Pushing and pulling the audience back and forth between the two so that there is never a clear understanding of what the characters are doing. This is why Rey figuring out how to fix the Millenium Falcon in the Sequel Trilogy is so vexing, “I bypassed the lightspeed coupler…” Rey should have been unable to fix it on her own. Chewie should have taken over flying while Han rushed over to work on the problem with Rey, together. They riff back and forth, showing the other what they know until they collectively come to a solution that works. Master and apprentice, father, and daughter — working together to solve a life-threatening problem. A missed opportunity to say the least. A lack in character development and interaction is what holds back the female Star Wars character from becoming admirable, interesting, and respected. It has nothing to do with the character being female;it has everything to do with how poorly they are written.
The same tired tropes surrounding female superiority were alive and well in Ahsoka. A female Jedi that struggled to form a strong relationship with audiences outside of the rabid fanbase of a twenty-five-year-old animated series. If you had not grown up watching it, you will not care — and the ratings reflect this. The audience needs to care about the character in the series or movie that they are watching now, not one they watched two decades prior. This is at the heart of why Disney Star Wars fails to repeat the viewership and ratings of The Mandalorian; audiences outside of Filoni’s animated series, do not care. Insisting the Force is female does not help either.
The original trilogy was amazing, and it centered around rescuing a princess that was tougher than its male hero, Luke Skywalker. Compared to Luke, Leia is an actual badass. She endures Darth Vader’s menacing threats and watches her home planet of Alderaan being obliterated, and still, she refuses to confess where the rebel base is located. When she is imprisoned on the Death Star, Luke and Han find her, but when they get cornered, she rips the blaster out of Luke’s hands, blows a hole in an access panel, and finds a way out. Sure, it leads them to a near death experience in a trash compactor, but the point is Leia is a female character of action and competency. Flash forward to the Disney Star Wars series of the last five years, and the female leads have turned into infallible characters that never develop, improve, or evolve because they were written as perfect from the start.
Now, we have The Acolyte — another half-baked female driven disaster. We are forced to watch a female protagonist that none of us care about. This is due largely to the fact that The Acolyte is set two hundred years before the events of the Star Wars Prequel Trilogy. You know what this does? It creates a show full of characters that no one knows, and because we do not know them, we will not care about them. The Acolyte should have been set in the future, that way the show can piggy-back off the established canon and lore — that everyone loves, and break away into new territory, riding the thin line between alien and familiar. Instead, we have a LGBTQ drenched snooze fest that is concerned with social justice representation instead of dynamic storytelling, interesting characters, and an engrossing plot. Kathleen Kennedy has driven the Star Wars IP into the ground over the last decade, and just when you think she has hit rock bottom, someone throws her a shovel.
A coven of space witches…all show and zero substance.
The future of Disney Star Wars does not look promising. We are at the point where Marvel was after Endgame; the series is tired and stretched far too thin at this point. A comeback might be on the horizon, but the heart and soul of what Lucas developed in his prime has been torn down by incompetent showrunners and producers who never developed a single original film, screenplay, or idea for that matter. The final frontier for Disney Star Wars is video games. The narrative, acting, and characters in EA’s Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order are light years ahead of what Disney is currently producing, even better than Favreau and Filoni’s Mandalorian series. Video games will save Star Wars from Kathleen Kennedy and her feminist showrunners; thankfully, Kennedy and her cohorts do not know how to code.