Star Wars: The Last Jedi and the Death of History

By Christopher Barr │POSTED ON JANUARY 03, 2018

The Last Jedi was a movie that was an interesting addition to the Star Wars saga.  It had marvelous special effects, it had some exciting battle scenes......

Spoilers...Spoilers...Spoilers...Spoilers...Spoilers...Spoilers...Spoilers...Spoilers...Spoilers...Spoilers...Spoilers...Spoilers...Spoilers

Okay this movie was either so brilliantly done or it was a massive mess that we all want to believe was great because it had Star Wars in its title.  There is a third way of looking at it.  Was the movie just not a good movie, not because it's Star Wars, not because it's a massive budget blockbuster extravaganza, but because the pieces that work so well in a good movie were absent here?

Is The Last Jedi a victim of it's time?  Is it's concepts and discombobulating narrative subject to the fractured times that permeate the closing pages of 'who we are' and 'where we are at' as a people in the privileged first world circa 2017?  Is this just a movie?  Of course it isn't because no movie, no story, no narrative is just a thing in and of itself.  We watch these stories because they mean something to us, they resonate, hopefully.  We learn about how to be good to people and how others have struggled to live through this life.  We certainly learn much of our morality through educational means outside the dark theaters and flat screens of our home entertainment systems, but to suggest that a film has nothing to say, whether a comedy, a drama, a horror film, or in this case a science fiction film, is quite frankly losing the meaning of film, narrative and how we interrupt the world outside the mind.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens was a fun movie and was a valid addition, while introducing this 40 year old fantasyland to younger people it also paid fan service to the Star Wars fans that actually grow up watching them through 1977 - 1983.  Its weakness' and its strengths oddly coexist in this paradigm of the past and the present simultaneously.  J.J. Abrams had massive mouths to feed and for the most part, he achieved this.  He took a mega-franchise and was awarded the task to restart the heart of a dying star.  The prequels divided the fans where confidence was low and the expectations of a sort of heart transplant seemed dim.  Abrams ignited excitement to this new rebirth, this new window into this galaxy far, far away.

The Force Awakens opened with for the most part, approval by fans of the originals and the prequels alike.  Yes some people bashed it, but that was going to happen.  Why wouldn't they, the movie had some plot issues, it killed off Han Solo (at the request of actor Harrison Ford no less), it played the replay button many times over throughout its running time.  The question is; what did we get in the end?  We got a movie that celebrated Star Wars, probably with a little fan service over-kill, but we still got an entertaining movie on its own right.  

Abrams' job, not only as a fan but as a director, was to introduce this world to a young audience and he did that.  The thing is, he gave a gift to the older audience, him being part of that audience, he gave the location to Luke Skywalker.  The first Star Wars movie from May of 1977 introduced a story of a young man that pulled himself out of the modest farming life only to discover he was part of a dynasty of Jedi that were warriors who fought against an evil Empire.  He was like a boy plucked from the pages of a Horatio Alger's novel, where the poor boy is plummeted, through no fault of his own, into the world of the wealthy and knowledgeable.  

With the three originals and the prequels, family was a main artery throughout the saga.  It was the spine that barely held the prequels together.  This Skywalker mythology was very much a part of The Force Awakens.  Stars Wars is about Skywalker.  Rogue One: A Star Wars Story was a successful episode outside of the Skywalker linage that proved to be exciting and worthy of its place in the Star Wars Universe.  Which now brings us back to The Last Jedi.

Yoda: Delicate waters I tread, hhhmmmmm.

What was great about The Last Jedi?  Stowing wants and desires that have been painted on the walls of many of our minds and memories in the Millennium Falcon weathered rusty grey, what happened in this movie?

Star Wars: The Last Jedi was not a good movie.  It has it's moments, it has its twists, contrived yes, but they were technically twists.  Poe Dameron takes out all the exterior laser canons on a massive Star Destroyer and then bombs were dropped onto this Star Destroyer in zero-gravity, nit-picky for sure, but what was interesting just minutes before this attack, General Hux suffered through humiliating conference call issues with Poe. 

Issues with The Last Jedi are littered all over the internet, most of which we all know by now; what's up with running out of fuel, how can Leia come alive and float in space, why are the First Order so tactically stupid, why did Luke not give a shit as he drank milk from whatever that thing was?  

The problem here is The Last Jedi was a victim of its time.  It was a Star Wars movie that was not a Star Wars movie.  It was a movie for kids and teenagers that heard about this galaxy far, far away but they can never ever live there.  The Last Jedi did away with the fantasy that kids in the 80's clung so hard to.  It brought the fantasy home with all the animal rights and the corporate greed and left out the allegorical mythology of the originals.

Yoda: Luke Skywalker is dead he is, hhmmmm, nothing without effort it was.

What did we learn from this episode of Star Wars?  What did we get in the end, that last shot of 'family' on the Millennium Falcon?  What did we really get out of this 8th film outside of a couple of cool action scenes and a couple, very few, dramatic moments?  We all wanted to love this movie but yet we didn't, some of us lied to ourselves, convincing us that it was the greatest of all the Star Wars movies, some didn't like it but didn't know why and some hated it because it wasn't the 'Star Wars' they were expecting.

This all turns around and follows back to the most fundamental question that was mentioned before; is this just a movie?  This movie has been seen by more people than Citizen Kane, Midnight Cowboy, The Godfather, Apocalypse Now combined so yes, this movie means something, for better or for worse.

Worse is the more obvious approach, it's message was to forget the past, "kill it if you have to."  It advocates, like so many movies these days, to 'kill' the past like it is worthless.  The problem with the past, whether you need cuddles or not, is it defines who we are in the present.  To 'kill' the past is to kill the self.  We can learn from the past and correct wrongs and make them rights, but we cannot divorce ourselves from the past know more than a shark can separate itself from water. 

Along with the SJW (Social Justice Warrior) Kylo Ren not getting his way fits and the millennial agenda of receiving without earning, princess warrior Rey did nothing to become a Jedi, the message here is fuck Joseph Campbell, fuck actual sacrifice and everyone gets what they want in their cuddly warm blanket.  Nietzsche as angry as he was when he was alive would fucking die of the all sulking and the I-want-it-my-way movement of the modern human (not gender specific) in the first world.

Star Wars: The Last Jedi, without lying to oneself and getting over the spell that Star Wars holds over us, was not a good movie, but more importantly, the movie didn't have a good message.  With that little 'together' moment at the end doesn't erase the fact that this movie was about the killing of the family and the killing of trust itself.  Sadly in the end this movie was about the kids and the young people watching it.  It's no more a Star Wars movie than comic book movies are for comic book fans.  It has evolved into a monster corporate commercial that is never ending.  It's a circus now, oddly resulting from the first major circus, Star Wars (1977), the (Snoke) snake eating its own tail.  

Sadly here we get Mickey Mouse eating his own tail.  Purple haired suicide bombers and superhero princess Leia and a Rose that never blooms.  

The fight in the red room was cool, ......high note.......?    

   

    

LOGAN: Wolverine and fighting the Future

By Christopher Barr │POSTED ON OCTOBER 22, 2016

I hurt myself today

To see if I still feel

I focus on the pain

The only thing that’s real.

The Logan trailer is by far the best trailer of the year so far.  It has masterfully distanced itself from the superhero movies that the film version of Wolverine came from.  This emotional trailer shows a not so distant future where Logan is living with his demons as his body doesn’t regenerate at the rate it once did.  It shows him caring for a sick Professor X in a somewhat dystopian sandy environment.

The Logan trailer looks like it draws visual inspiration from the damn near flawless film Hell or High Water and the equally flawless Coen Brothers film No Country for Old Men.  It has hints of Mad Max but the world in the trailer hasn’t got that bad yet.  There was a hint of Se7en in this trailer as well with a very quick little happy moment around the dinner table, that we can tell, like in Se7en, is all the joy we’re going to get, before we dive back into the dreadful reality of not only the end of the mutants but possibly the end of the Wolverine.

And you could have it all

My empire of dirt

I will let you down

I will make you hurt.

Hugh Jackman’s performance just in the trailer is chillingly brilliant.  His ‘Old Man Logan’ is wonderful and heartbreaking at the same time.  He appears to be in the winter of his discontent, he appears to be slowly dying, and while this realization may overwhelm him, it looks like it equally frightens him.

Professor X in the first X-Men movie helped Logan not only face his current demons at the time, but also he helped him unlock parts of his past.  Logan and Professor X’s relationship in the X-Men movies were arguably the best parts of the whole franchise.  The only other complex and equally interesting relationship was the one that Professor X had with Magneto.

Logan looks like the friendship between Professor X and Logan is going to reach the palpable relationship of a father and son.  The film truly feels like a last chapter in a long journey for a character who probably should have died long ago for some of things he’s done, but in his suffering is the fact that he lives on.

I can’t recall the last time I saw a movie trailer where the music that accompanies the footage was so wonderfully married.  Johnny Cash’s Nine Inch Nails cover of Hurt couldn’t have been anymore perfect.  The sorrow that permeates that song and the realization that you were responsible for so much pain, and then how much you want to off load it, just to live again, or to live in peace, but you can’t because it’s there, wallpapered on every corner of your mind.  It’s absolute brilliance to play this wonderfully sad painful song while juxtaposing it with the long life of a man that has suffered and that has made others suffer, whether it was utilitarian, vengeance or plain righteousness.

The brilliance of the trailer is it makes us ask more questions rather than a lot of trailers that just provide answers.  Why is Professor X in the state he’s in, why is Logan on the run, who is this young girl and why is he not healing at the rate he use to?  What the trailer did for me and imagine for a lot of other people is made forget that it’s even a superhero movie.  It gave me hope that the superhero genre can elevate well beyond the pages of its original source material.

If I could start again

A million miles away

I will keep myself

I would find a way.

The Shallows: Aloneness and Surviving the Jaws of an Impending Doom

By Christopher Barr │POSTED ON JUNE 28, 2016

“The weak die out and the strong will survive, and will live on forever.”  

- Anne Frank, The Diary of Anne Frank

 

There are some minor spoilers so tread lightly, as if in shallow waters, if you haven’t seen the film.  Some of what is said below could bite you, which is not the intentions of this writer.

The Shallows is a survival horror thriller where a young medical student is stranded a couple hundred meters off the shore of a remote beach in Mexico.  The reason for this is because of a massive great white shark that is circling the shallow waters waiting her out.

The film is Jaws meets Alien meets 127 Hours and ends up not being as great as the DNA that birthed it.  That said, The Shallows is a thrilling film that engages its audience while struggling to not follow typical teenage thriller troupes that are themselves…shallow. 

The Shallows wanted to be more then it ended up becoming.  The music video slow motion scenes in the beginning were to entertain and to draw in the short-attention-span crowd of the audience.  The opening twenty minutes of the masterpiece sci-fi horror thriller Alien would never work today with all the media addicted, ‘we want it now’, movie-going audience.  Alien was a slow burner and that was the point, you had to wait patiently for the Alien to become a true threat to the seven ‘truck drivers in space’ before the screams and violence started to happen.

The Shallows attempted to create this claustrophobic place, even in the openness of a beach shore, where a survivor is forced to come to terms with her calamity and either fight or flight.  Flight for her wasn’t really an option so fighting was something she had to accept, that or just dying from the bite she suffered from the shark while surfing.

Nancy is a medical student that travelled to a specific secluded beach where her mother use to surf off the coast of Mexico, when she found out she was pregnant with Nancy many year ago.  Her mother had passed away prior to the events of the film.  Nancy trekked off to this beach to, in a sense, make sense of who her mother was.  Nancy wanted to find some other connection with her mother after her death resulting from some form of cancer.

The problem with the film was a battle with a genuine story of survival and a corporate studio driven thriller that only wanted to shock its audience with a pretentious music video.  The conflict between honest movie making and studio, sponsor friendly, lowest common denominator-type product analyzing, is palpable, certainly in the first half of the film and at the last pay-off of the movie.

The Shallows is about survival which makes this story ancient.  Certainly The Revenant was equally a story of survival.  Was it a better film than The Shallows?  It was in pretty well every way possible but even though The Revenant has thriller aspects throughout it, it’s not the thriller that The Shallows is.  The Revenant aimed far deeper into the human condition and pushed the innate drive to survive far, far more than The Shallows.  The point here is The Shallows is meant to be taken lightly, even within its high stakes of survival. 

The shark in The Shallows is the shark in Jaws, it’s the Xenomorph in Alien, it’s not quite the bear in The Revenant because the bear in that film never becomes an ongoing threat to its survivor.  There have been some criticism regarding The Shallows about logistics, ‘the rock where she’s on is this distance from there, and the whale is this distance but when you look over head it’s different, the shore looks closer sometimes in shots from her point of view then in others’.  The logistical nightmare that Dante’s Inferno would have on the innovation and mathematically, finely tuned, internet savoy, movie going audience would be a nightmare beyond even Dante’s nightmares.

The point of The Shallows, if this needs to sadly be spelt out, is the shark is a metaphor for a traumatic impact Nancy sustained while just recently loosing the woman who gave birth to her.  Psychologically, these events needed to happen, ‘in her mind’, so she could live her life.  This impact and trauma is at least half of the story of philosophy, which is the story of not only what it means to be alive but what it means to survive living while being alive.  The idea of how far Nancy is from the shore, how far the shark is from her at any given moment is not really the point, it’s the thrill, but not the point.

“The theoretical understanding of the world, which is the aim of philosophy, is not a matter of great practical importance to animals, or to savages, or even to most civilized men.”  

- Bertrand Russell

The Shallows was about systematically breaking down the control that civilization and language itself holds heavily on each and every one of us.  In the beginning, Nancy had the safety of her cell phone, her technology, her connection to the ‘ordered’ world, but then it all went away.  All she was left with was, certainly one of the great fears that permeates society like the biggest unseen plague, reality, in all its nakedness.

Nancy was no longer safe within the Symbolic Order, language and her sexualized femininity wasn’t going to help her, just as it wouldn’t help a man on that rock while the shark waited to be fed.  The shark, like the Xenomorph in Alien, holds now value on what we call human life, all our dreams of the future and what we think the value of our life means.  It wants to eat, that’s it.  It doesn’t care about who we leave behind if we die because the shark’s brain is instinct driven.  Shopping, what car we own, what status we believe we belong to in society and whatever god, that our particular region of birth worships means nothing outside the structure of language and the natural world.

As human beings, our second greatest fear is anything that could harm us without ever caring who we are.  We are ‘special’, we are singled out, we are often celebrated for our desirability, the fantasy here is we believe we are not food and we also believe we are too important to be killed.  The Shallows effectively exploits this fear, if we didn’t actually have this fear, this film would be meaningless.  Alien, The Revenant and The Shallows wouldn’t work without our narcissism.  Why, because all that would be left is indifference, but it isn’t, we care because we want to survive in our own lives and we fear, which is our first great fear, death, the end of whoever or whatever we think we are.   

The Shallows is exciting in its slow burn to the end, it is a reminder that nature doesn’t give a fuck about you and how many friends you have on Facebook.  Nature doesn’t care about your family and who you say you love, The Shallows is an eye opener, it’s an awakening to the sleep, that Nancy and millions of people like her in first world need.  Sadly, given some of the not-so favorable reviews the film has got, metaphor itself is looking like it needs to be put on the endangered species list.  In the end if we can survive this monster of technological control, this governmental and corporate suffocation we too may survive, because as Nietzsche said, “Whatever doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger.”

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives.  It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.”  

- Charles Darwin

CAPTAIN AMERICA: Civil War and allowing Revenge and Guilt To Consume Us Within

By Christopher Barr │POSTED ON MAY 13, 2016

Compromise, reassurance, that’s how the world works.

Longing….

“Our very strength incites challenge.  Challenge incites conflict.  And Conflict… breeds catastrophe.”

- Vision

There are some spoilers ahead so be aware.

Captain America: Civil War is a superhero movie with loads of action and spectacle for a wide ranging audience, the addition of Black Panther and Spider-Man couldn’t have been any better.  The film is also an ethical, moral, social and civil study on what a responsible human being ought to do in a seemingly civilized society.  The film is an essay on what’s best for the greater good.  The film is also about fear and control, fear of these superheroes and their powers over average people and the control that the government want to pose on those powers.

Rusted….

After a battle to retrieve a biological weapon stolen by HYDRA, Scarlet Witch, saves Captain America from blowing up by forcing an explosion away that was detonated directly in front of him by Crossbones, inadvertently this causes the upper floors of a building in Lagos, Nigeria to blow up.  This explosion ends up killing a number of relief workers from Wakanda and as a consequence, escalates international distrust of the unchecked actions of the Avengers.  This causes the Secretary of State Thaddeus Ross, who was the military force attempting to capture Bruce Banner in The Incredible Hulk, to inform the Avengers that the United Nations in a couple days plan to pass the Sokovia Accords, which essentially pulls back the freedom the Avengers had to battle with their enemies.  This resulted in the destruction of a couple of cities and the loss of many lives, and puts it in the control of the military who plan to police the actions of the Avengers.

Seventeen….

“Captain, while a great many people see you as a hero, there are some who prefer the word vigilante.  You’ve operated with unlimited power and no supervision.  That’s something the world can no longer tolerate.”

– General Ross

Civil War has a very Jason Bourne feel in its attempt to ground the more fantastical to the real world.  The film oddly has a tone and palate of a real life based thriller.  Unlike the battle at the end of Batman V Superman, Civil War wants its audience to look at the consequences and actions of its superheroes, echoing Alan Moore’s The Watchmen.  Batman V Superman somewhat alienated its audience by promising realism and bombastically delivering this non-relatable cartoon.  Civil War has something clearly to say that has an actual grounding and topical meaning behind its spectacle.

Daybreak…. 

Civil War is about the system of freedom versus an individual’s freedom.  This problem has always been the conflict in most societies, historically and in the present.  Captain America believes that the safest hands are his own where Tony Stark, suffering from an avalanche of guilt since becoming Iron Man, has decided to allow the system to partake in the responsibility.  Tony no longer wants the consequences of the actions of Iron Man and the Avengers to fall directly on them anymore.  His ego is damaged and his vulnerability is palpable.  Tony Stark is breaking and he knows it.

Furnace….

Steve Rogers believes, and rightfully so, that the government is controlled by people, and powerful people have agendas, for him, they can’t be trusted.  Steve’s right to think the Sokovia Accords are a misstep, an excuse for the United Nations to gain control of a power that is well out of their control.  They mean to tame the Avengers and cage them if necessary, quite similar to that of animals.  This military industrial complex would not only use these superhuman people as a nuclear deterrent but also, if necessary, as its own form of nuclear weapon, with the likes of Thor, Hulk, Scarlet Witch and Vision have the power to achieve.

Nine….

Steve Rogers was a soldier for the government that woke up and became a rebel for the people.  Tony Stark was a playboy looking out for himself and now has become an Iron weapon for the very government he quite vocally opposed.  Both these men grew in opposite directions.  Steve still stayed pure and the problem with Tony is he sought medicine for what he believed he became.  Tony is right to be concerned with not only what the Avengers have done but what they could do that may harm or kill innocent people.  The problem here is Tony is being Tony and only really thinking out for himself.  Tony is concerned with what they do and how it makes him feel.  Steve is never concerned with his ego and how he feels about what he does, he’s more concerned, in a utilitarian sense, with what’s best for the greater good and the quality of life for the majority.  

Benign….

 

The civil obedient is fair worse a problem than the civil disobedient.  A problem that philosopher Henry David Thoreau had with the population was what they were all willing to go along with and what they weren’t.  The civil disobedient during the history of all civilizations were almost always met with disapproval, dislike, displacement, dismemberment and even death in many cases.  The real problem is never with those people that didn’t go along with the system, the real problem is the blind, the ignorant and the conformists that welcome their own enslavement, as they eat fried chicken and watch a reality show about survival in a location they’ll never see in real life.  

Homecoming….

There is this peevish discontent that develops during the divide of the Avengers.  The airport fight showdown between this divide is one of the most entertaining and delightful parts of this film.  This is when we see Spider-Man in action and boy does he deliver.  We know they can all take a little beating from each other, we know some of them were even pulling their punches because they really didn’t want to fight each other. 

One….

“An empire toppled by its enemies can rise again, but one which crumbles from within? That’s dead… forever.”

- Zemo

In the end Team Cap versus Team Iron Man were only playing checkers when their real opponent played the biggest Bobby Fischer game, with only a couple chess moves to get the Avengers in check mate.  The real fight, the real check mate moment was during the end when Iron Man found out how his parents really died.  This resulted in a near fight to the death between Cap and Bucky against Iron Man.  Colonel Helmut Zemo, the film’s more mysterious bad guy, beat them all in the end even though he was arrested and incarcerated afterwards.  Zemo set out to dismantle the Avengers, dividing them as they fought each other over autonomy versus accountability, for what they unknowingly did to his family in Sokovia by the calamitous end of Avengers: Age of Ultron.  He wasn’t your typical power hungry marvel villain, he actually had a pretty relatable reason for what he did.  What really made him wrong, in his manipulative act of vengeance, was he didn’t have all the facts, like the fact they would all have been dead if Ultron created the extinction event he wanted.

Freight Car….

The Avengers are responsible for killing many people.  The bad guys dying can be looked at as an occupational hazard, but the collateral damage is the real problem here.  There are numerous innocent people dying during all these big epic battles because they were in the wrong place, and in the wrong time.  Here’s were the fiction of the comics bleed into our real world.  The reported collateral damage around the world is becoming more ubiquitous than we’d all like to admit.  Drones are dropping bombs on ‘targets’ and are sadly killing innocent bystanders as the ‘evil’ of the world is being exterminated by the so-called ‘just’.  Back in the fiction world of the Avengers, if they left Ultron to execute his plan, most, if not all the people of this planet would be dead.  It could be argued, quite successfully, that the saving of the planet was the greater good. 

Soldier?