The Star Wars Prequels got a lot of flack, mostly deserved, for stilted dialogue, stilted performances, stilted narrative plotting. But there’s still good in them.
The most recent Star Wars film, The Last Jedi, has been unfairly maligned by a vocal minority of “fans” as being terrible. Those “fans” are wrong and I don’t want to engage in anything more about it except to say this isn’t even a place where we can agree to disagree. I have yet to hear a single criticism that I found even remotely worthy of discussion. I had a few minor quibbles but I’m just going to leave my circa early 1990s back-of-the-VHS box pull quotes here: “Star Wars The Last Jedi is the best picture of 2017. It’s a movie for our times that delves into fandom, culture, society, and begs us to be better than who we are.”
I say all of this because as I prepare to embark on my Star Wars Tour Of Tunisia… which happens to feature a marathon or two in there… our nation is once again confronted with the horrors of a mass shooting. I’m not going to say anything more but I wanted to put two film quotes here, quotes that come from the second film in a cycle of Star Wars trilogy films:
Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones (2002):
Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi (2017):
I’m not saying anything new or useful at this point. Another tragic mass shooting has occurred and words mean nothing. If the horrors of Sandy Hook (a tragedy that occurred SIX YEARS AGO) couldn’t move the government to take the bold and necessary actions to crack down on weapons of mass devastation, I’m not sure anything will. It’s all happened before and too many times at that and there seems to be little political backbone in DC to change the future.
But I try and have hope for us all.