What a crock of shit. The failures of the latest Star Wars has nothing to do with a diverse cast. We get it; old, white males (ie. "fans") are pissed. There are good reasons; diversity isn't it.
Note, The Mandalorian is full of diversity and breaks the mold of what old, white males consider as "good" for fathers' parental role or emotion.
Stupid storylines which overwrite everything from previous films (so people can use the force to come back to life now? That would have been useful in the 1980 movies...).
The last Star Wars movie I saw was the Last Jedi. It had an unbelievably messed up plot and was one of the worst written movies I've seen in a long time. Filled with bizarre plot holes, but more importantly it lost the good vs evil balance that made the original films so enjoyable.
Star Wars has always been about the scrappy underdogs facing off against impossible odds and winning, in the style of classic stories everywhere. In the Last Jedi the writers completely failed to understand that and wrote a story in which the "heros" of the Rebel Alliance are completely wiped out by a vastly superior Imperial force. Not just numerically superior but superior in every way:
- Decision making is better
- Alliances are better (people rat out the rebels pretty frequently)
- They invest in technology R&D and then use it to win, which is practically "Fighting Wars 101".
Literally the movie consists of the rebels all being killed whilst they try pathetically to run away whilst being constantly out-smarted by their opponents. By the end of the movie what's left of them fits into the Millenium Falcon. We're meant to root for the Rebels in Star Wars movies but by the end I found myself somehow rooting for the Empire, for the first time.
I'm ignoring all the impossible physics like spaceships dropping bombs that fall out of their bottoms, the "space race" and many other head scratcher moments.
Why was the movie such a mess? The primary criteria for selecting writers and scripts was how feminist they were, not whether they were competent writers. The writer/director for this film was and still is a nobody. The head of Lucasfilm (a woman) said she selected him because he "writes strong female characters". Not because he had a good track record of making good movies, not because he deeply understood Star Wars. No - he got the job because he's a feminist.
This is exactly the sort of reason so many people get upset at diversity-based appointments. Even when the jobs go to men they go to the men who toe the ideological line even if they're useless at their jobs.
What's amazing is that Rian Johnson sucked as a writer so much he couldn't even make a properly feminist movie. The Empire is the embodiment of the stereotypical patriarchy. It seems to be run almost exclusively by white British men (and one alien). It's all about strength and ruling through fear. It constantly invents new weapons.
Meanwhile the Alliance is run exclusively by women, one of whom is even purple haired. The women in the movie all have amazing superpowers e.g. Rey can learn to use the force way faster than Skywalker could, yet their decision making is consistently awful. They're in a war yet they prioritise avoidance of conflict even when that's obviously hopeless. They run when they should fight, they demote the only actual rebel they seem to have left (Poe), they don't invest in technology so they're hopelessly outgunned by the Empire and they're so bad at being rebels that third party characters constantly either betray or ignore them (nobody in the galaxy comes to their aid when they broadcast a call for assistance at the end).
I left the film feeling like it pretty systematically portrayed white British men as the personification of evil and diversity-driven feminism as the embodiment of moral virtue. But it was so confusingly written it also portrayed evil as systematically more competent than good in every way. Not sure what message they felt the audience would receive, but I'm really not sure it's the one they intended.
I think the hate has become a separate movement, especially in the corner where your "criticism" comes from. It's quite easy to crap on things these days because you can find others online who will love to jump in. Especially on such a low level.
It surely wasn't perfect but neither was the old SW. We're not talking about some over the top philosophical art house cinema here. The original was a classic heroes journey with a princess. That wasn't what would work today and it's not like nobody saw it. I know many people from different age groups who enjoyed what Disney has made out of this sleeping material in the last years.
