Let The Past Die

23/1/20 KC Complains A Lot 15

There’s a lot of things that people get wrong about Star Wars: The Last Jedi it what it really means to “let the past die”.

When Kylo says it to Rey, the two characters are at a crossroads. They can either continue to fight the same, tired war that has wages for eons, or to keep rehashing the same ol’ plot points from movies past…or they can create something new. They don’t have to have a Jedi Order. They don’t need the Sith. The past has to die, because the old ways are not the best. The only way to make something new is to deconstruct the old thing, to bury it, to try again from scratch.

It’s the director’s way of trying to convince an rabid audience that it is okay to let go of the things we once cherished. It’s okay that Star Wars isn’t for you anymore. It can’t be anymore. There’s so much history between that movie and these movies, so many writers, so many visions, so many takes and turns, countless novels, endless hot takes and hot takes about hot takes and hot takes about hot takes about hot takes. The only way Star Wars can exist is to fucking evolve. You let it die, so it can live.

That’s why the microwaved leftovers of Rise of Skywalker went down so bad. Because repackaging ideas from the worst elements of your fanbase trying to fill a hole that you can’t possibly fill in pointless. It doesn’t matter what the intent was; even if it was completely innocent, it feels of corporate meddling from Herbs who have no fucking idea what this thing is or what makes people upset about how it gets treated or why they love it. And even if it does make money, it will never be as loved as the past movies, or even as loathed as the prequels and TLJ. They would’ve been better off leaving it dead, building on new ideas, then trying to fool us into buying something we know is garbage.

In other news, the Chief Herb hired a Scab Herb to try and reanimate the corpse of a formerly good website. It’s gonna suck.

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About KC Complains A Lot 135 Articles
KC Complains A Lot is another refugee from Deadspin. He enjoys writing and not caving to pressure from herbs.

15 Comments

    • That’s a good read. I remember reading somewhere that what made Spanfeller flip out for good was the little video that Dan McQuade filed about his visit to the chonky cat that was being rehabbed in a Philadelphia animal shelter. What monster freaks out about a good cat video?

      Speaking of former Deadspinners, David Roth is picking up from the untimely demise of Deadcast to start a podcast with Talia Levin on Moby Dick:

      https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/moby-dick-energy-a-moby-dick-podcast

      I read it long ago in college, and boy is it weird. But it’s great, too, once you give up expecting it to be a normal book.

  2. Disney should have read this piece before they started. The Force Awakens was a good movie until they started bringing back all of the old gang and made Kylo into Leia and Han’s bad boy. Completely agree that reheating the leftovers was a huge waste of time.

    At least they could have done what Lucas did the first time around and reheated the plots of some different movies, like he did by slicing and dicing old WW2 movies and Kurosawa flicks.

  3. Well said. I really like The Last Jedi. It’s not the greatest movie, the plot is a little wonky, but at least it’s about something. And it really felt like a bridge to a new chapter which was the point.

    • …I think in theory that’s sort of what the Open Threads are/were intended for?

      …I know I frequently make folks do entirely too much scrolling to get there but generally I think we aimed to have there be somewhere each day that folks could post links &/or comment as they pleased should they feel like it

      …that said I imagine HML might feel like adding that to the post in question, so thanks for bringing it to my/their/our attention

    • Young pic of the dude looks a bit like the Onion’s stoner, Jim Anchower, if he were also a probable Russian agent and a racist shithead.

      Aren’t these the same racist shitheads who believed that Obama was a Manchurian Candidate sent by Russia? Yet these mental feebs end up being run by a Russian “asset”.

  6. Not really a Star Wars person but I feel this way about a lot of re-makes and sequels they have been doing, like just a couple decades later. I don’t think 20 years really is enough time for a remake to feel like it’s bringing anything new (other than CGI and HD I guess) – maybe I’m just getting old enough. 20 years is way too long to do a fucking sequel using the same actors, just recycling the old jokes to appeal to the people who liked the movie 20 years ago.

  7. I’ve tried to come up with a good explanation of my feelings about Disney Wars: Everyone’s a Jedi Now Please Buy More Toys, but I could never put it into words. Luckily this video explains my feelings perfectly, and in only 2 hours.

    Also, Duck Feadspin.

    P.S. HAN SHOT FIRST

  8. eh.. i dont have a problem with the new star wars movies.. but i guess theyve all never been more than entertainment to me… and they are all good at being just that
    now all the disney remakes of the classics irritate me (im ignoring them…woo..saaah)
    tho if they remake the aristocats i will probably go nuclear

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