I don't hate the Star Wars prequels. Indeed, there's a lot about them that I like quite a bit. I like the emphasis on politics, given that the eponymous "wars" don't exist in a vacuum. I like the small throwaway gags, like the V8 in Annakin's skycar in Attack of the Clones. I like their ambition.
A right-thinking prequel-hating Star Wars fan would have no truck with my relationship with Star Wars. It is complicated and in no way abject or adoring. They're fucking movies, after all, and if movies are also a lifestyle, then I'll choose another hill to die on, thank you very much. But that's just me. As with matters of love and sex, it's not my kink but I don't care if it's yours.
That's not to say that Star Wars and I don't have a history. Lordy, lordy, do we! My first encounter with Star Wars was a sold-out showing in 1977. My dad took my brothers and I to the theater intending to see this cultural phenomenon, only to be turned away. We went to see The Deep instead, and the image of Jacqueline Bisset in a wet t-shirt was indelibly etched in my mind, perhaps more so than anything in Star Wars. But I digress. We finally made it into another sold-out showing of Star Wars a week later. I only ever saw it once in the theater. I was too young at the time to be seeing movies on my own and my parents weren't interested in multiple viewings of a movie they'd already paid to see. I was moviegoing on my own by the time Empire came out and I saw it nine times when it was in theaters. It's the only one of the original trilogy I paid to see when the films were re-released in the late 90s. I thought George Lucas's revisions of Empire were mutilations, but of the three, it was the one he fiddled with the least. I hated Jedi. You cannot convince me that the prequels are any worse than Jedi. Still and all, Star Wars is part of movies and movies are my version church. It's not like I wasn't going to go see the new film, in spite of my dislike of J. J. Abrams.
Our showing did not get off to a good start. There were twenty minutes of previews. Twenty minutes! And all of them were for fantasy action/adventure films like the new Captain America film, the new X-Men film, the belated Independence Day sequel, something called The Fifth Wave which looks like a teen version of Independence Day, and--god help me--Gods of Egypt and Warcraft. The only preview that held any charm was Legendary Beasts and Where To Find Them, which was not suffused with apocalyptic unease or ever-escalating stakes. This is the legacy of Star Wars: a cinematic landscape where every tentpole movie is some variety of fantasy film. It's a mark of how relentless this influence is that it burned me out. I cut my teeth on horror movies and Ray Harryhausen, back when good cinematic fantasias were as rare as the teeth of the hydra. I used to love them. Now, they're so ubiquitous that they're just noise. Just so you know where my prejudices lie.
The Gods of Egypt trailer is useful, though. A few weeks ago, the filmmakers on that project made a public apology for the whiteness of their film. If cultural mores continue to shift, there's a fair possibility that Gods of Egypt will be among the last artifacts of our culture's default setting of "straight white male." So let me start with praise for Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015, directed by J. J. Abrams). Set apposite Gods of Egypt, it's radically new. It's radically forward-looking. Its diversity is refreshing. Its diversity is organic. Its diversity, positioned as an integral part of such a cultural white elephant (if you'll pardon the pun), is significant. At no point in the film was I jolted out of the narrative because the protagonist was a black man and because I am not a black man. At no point was I jolted out of the narrative because its other protagonist is a white woman, even though, as a white woman, I'm not used to seeing myself represented in big action tentpoles. Hell, the only time I really lost my identification with the film was when it focused on the legacy characters: Leia, Han Solo. Han Solo. Old white dude. I felt like the filmmakers included the older characters out of a sense of validation, as if to distance themselves from the prequels by importing elements that tell the audience that, yes, this is the genuine article. Only Luke Skywalker himself--positioned like Harry Lime as a presence often mentioned but never seen and also as the film's Maguffin--seems organic to the narrative. Significantly, he has about a minute of actual screen time. The parts of the film that focused on these characters rather than Finn (the black conscientious objecting stormtrooper) and Rey (the scavenger turned chosen one force warrior) struck me as a facile forgery.
Note: here there be spoylers.
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