I’m Tired of Star Wars

The MCU, too

Star Wars was never my favorite sci-fi franchise. That doesn’t mean I didn’t like Star Wars. I watched all the movies when I was a kid. I lined up early to see the prequels. I read most of the books in the Extended Universe up until the Yuuzhan Vong showed up and the whole thing just went turbo stupid. Even at that I never really considered myself a big Star Wars fan.

My big three sci-fi franchises are Babylon 5, Star Trek, and BattleTech (of all things). The Expanse is now in the conversation as well. I could never figure out why Star Wars never managed to top my list. It’s not just because I think The Force Awakens is a bad movie as this question predates that movie. I do think that JJ Abrams’ failures in The Force Awakens point me in the direction of why.

Star Wars offers a limited space for storytelling. Bear with me here, as I am about to say something that probably seems utterly indefensible. The Star Wars universe as a whole suffers from a crippling lack of imagination.

George Lucas never set out to break new ground with Star Wars. He borrowed heavily from the visual language of existing movies. He based the entire story on Joseph Campbell’s concept of the Hero’s Journey. That’s fine. The original trilogy still stands up as something like brilliant storytelling and fun sci-fi.

Star Wars never really broke out of that mold for some reason. Lucas ruined the universe with the prequel trilogy. It’s not that he made bad movies — even though he most definitely did — it’s that he made bad mythology. This is a danger whenever backstory gets filled in but it doesn’t help when it’s done with such ham-handed blundering as we saw in the prequels.

Think back to the worldbuilding we got in the very first movie. Obi-Wan Kenobi spoke of the Clone Wars as if they were an ancient conflict. Han Solo couldn’t believe Luke was a Jedi because the Force was just a bunch of nonsense stories from long ago. In those little snippets we got a glimpse of a huge universe with its own mythology and religion and ancient conflicts. Darth Vader was just the latest in a long line of enforcers for the evil Galactic Empire.

Then, and this will seem positively blasphemous, George Lucas went and ruined his own universe with the big reveal at the end of The Empire Strikes Back. Darth Vader revealed that he’s Luke’s Father. The story collapsed on itself and went from being a vast, galaxy-sized playground to being a single family’s generational struggle.

The prequels told the earlier generation’s story. They further shrank the universe by reducing the Clone Wars and the end of the Jedi Order into a series of events that occurred less than two decades before the original trilogy. In their attempt to answer the question of origin the prequel trilogy created a much more complicated question, namely the one where we ask, “How did everyone forget everything so quickly?” The galaxy of long, long ago shrunk from a vast space with a long history to a single generation.

This was a problem that expanded into the Extended Universe. Most of the books focused specifically on the Skywalkers, the Solos, or both. When they didn’t do that they often focused on characters who appeared in the movies. That’s all nice and neat when it comes time to create a narrative but it doesn’t really allow someone consuming the media to create their own space to play.

I’ve found myself increasingly incapable of caring about Rogue One. I couldn’t figure out why. I knew JJ Abrams wasn’t directing it. I knew that it focused on characters we haven’t met yet. These are good things.

I think the problem is the plot itself. It’s a bunch of people trying to steal the plans for the Death Star. They can’t or won’t pull out of the single narrative that we already know. There’s a huge galaxy with thousands of years of history and billions of stories to explore and we’re going to watch a prequel. Hooray.

This is the overall problem with Star Wars now. We’re going to be getting a lot of Star Wars since these movies make all the money and get all the buzz. But we’re going to see the same movies crossing and re-crossing the same territory over and over again. It’s not going to be, “Hey, let’s go explore the origins of the Sith,” it’s going to be, “Hey, we did a heist movie in the Star Wars universe. Should we make a rom-com that’s all Star Wars-y?”

Star Wars never offered me a universe that felt like it wanted me to play around. The new Disney-fication of the franchise is making that even worse.

On that note we also have Disney’s other big movie generator: Marvel Studios.

I’m just exhausted by the Marvel Cinematic Universe now. They put out a new movie every couple of weeks. The movies are all big spectacles that are guaranteed to at least not suck.

The problem here is that they all follow the same damn formula. It’s a good formula. It’s a profitable formula. But it’s just undifferentiated pablum by now. It’s also never going to end. Each movie just introduces the equivalent of a ’90s serial TV villain of the week who probably comes down from a sky hole on a beam of light so our heroes can have a big fight scene. Nothing is ever resolved. Nothing can ever be resolved because if it does Marvel won’t be able to make another billion four months from now.

This, I think, is the problem with both Star Wars and the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Both franchises now exist to extract my money. They don’t care if they tell stories that fire the imagination or invite me to play in their big, expansive universes. They tell stories that allow them to set up the next stories or keep me from forgetting them when it’s time to hype the next installment.

It’s all very cynical and exhausting.

I think I’m done participating.

As usual I hope you found this interesting and got something out of it. Please like and share and do all of that fun stuff. Leave a tip if you feel so inclined. I’m also trying to create my own sci-fi universe that will offer enough space for anyone to play. Check it out.

Or, if you want something completely different, consider my new ebook: “Horror in the Holy Land.” It’s a fun bit of historical fiction available on Kindle or Nook. There’s a bit of a teaser here.