Disney Ruined Star Wars

Growing up, I was about the biggest Star Wars fan you could be. I watched all the movies repeatedly multiple times a week, had all the toys, had a Star Wars-themed birthday party, and kept on liking it into recent years. When Disney acquired Star Wars and The Force Awakens came out, I was optimistic. The movie was a rip off of A New Hope, but it was still pretty good when you push that fact aside. Then, The Last Jedi came out and that really shook up the momentum of the story, and I actually believed this trilogy was going to be its own awesome thing… and then The Rise of Skywalker happened. At first, I lied to myself. There was no way the final movie in a 9 movie saga could’ve been THAT bad… right? Wrong.

Spoilers if you haven’t seen the OG Trilogy: When you bring back the Emperor, whose death had such a meaningful part of the original 6 movies, and give him a zillion Deathstars with planet-destroying tech and don’t explain how, why, or WHY Palpatine is suddenly alive hooked up to some hospital bed with a Sith Trooper army announcing to the entire galaxy he’s actually alive, you kinda start to lose me. The more I thought about it, the more I couldn’t bear it.

These greedy bastards bought the title from Lucas, and destroyed everything he created because they had no vision, they were just in it for the money.

I’ve just decided to not count the last 3 movies as canon. In Bob Iger’s book, he literally writes that George Lucas felt “betrayed” by how they handled Star Wars. Like, do you not see that’s kind of a dick move? You took this man’s creation and told him you’d use his outline in creating the new films, obviously tossed them in the garbage and decided to just give the trilogy a female protagonist and that everything would be fine. And I do not mean that in a discriminatory way; when the movies first came out, I always defended Daisy Ridley’s character and said it was absurd to think that they chose a female lead just for the sake of it with no good story for her character. Boy, was I wrong. The sad truth is that corporate executives love identity politics, and they oftentimes do prioritize casting a female lead to APPEAR like they care about representation over outlining the script to actually make that female lead (or at least any of the characters besides Kylo Ren) have any sort of arc or change. But if I had to take a wild guess, I don’t think Bob Iger would put ANYTHING that made him look like a dick in his own book, assuming he wrote it.

I wish I didn’t have to de-canonize the movies. I wanted these movies to be better than anyone out there, but I realized the corporate nightmare that it was, and it kind of ruined Star Wars for me. At least The Mandolorian is really good. This goes to show you that a story should only be made when the creator feels like it needs to be told… when a story is only told to invoke nostalgia and maximize profits, it loses all it’s supposed to have.