Rehosting "My Review of Star Wars Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker"
I can’t believe they made Emperor Palpatine’s skin orange in the new Star Wars: The Rise of The Skywalker™
Dec 18, 2019
The movie “Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker” does not exist. There is no script, there are no characters, no plot, not even any special effects. When you step into the cinema, you and all the other movie-goers simply stare at a black screen for two hours and 21 minutes. The Star Wars theme plays on the speakers in the beginning and at the end. The cinematic industrial complex expects you to leave and implicitly accept a wordless agreement with everyone else, to pretend you all saw a movie, to avoid embarrassment.
This is the solution they thought up to the problem that they didn’t know which movie to make. After the disastrous mishandling of the IP by the Disney corporation, there was no way left to go. There was nothing to salvage. There was no way to make another movie. So they simply didn’t.
They went through the motions. Writers sat down in a writers room, actors were cast and lines were rehearsed, new music was written. Everyone showed up for the shoots, the director told them what to do, special effects artists spent thousands upon thousands of hours on their computers. The only difference being that no one ever turned on a camera, no one ever shot anything, edited anything, or produced anything.
You might be thinking, wait a minute, but I’ve seen a trailer for the movie. I’ve seen leaked stills floating around on illegal dark web anime discussion websites. Hey what gives
Wrong. What you have done is acquiesced to the shared cultural delusion that the Disney corporation is trying to pull over your head. You might have seen the old Carpenter movie “They Live”, it’s that sort of deal. What’s really there is just a few words on a black background, and you are yourself projecting the imagery onto the screen.
Here’s you:
You don’t except anything except a “glorious shitshow” after The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi. You just want to laugh at it, not with it. You just want to watch it to be able to dunk on all the nerds and losers online who actually care about it, lmao. You want to watch it ONLY to stay in the loop for the next couple of weeks and get all the jokes everyone will make about how bad it is, and get mad about the girls being mad about Daisy Ridley’s tits not being big enough for her to be an inspiring hero little girls can look up to.
And secretly, you used to care a little bit years and years ago, but now the nostalgia bait isn’t about returning to innocence and childhood, and watching a true adventure story and feeling good, but the nostalgia of bitter righteousness and catharsis of when you first saw the RedletterMedia Star Wars reviews. You don’t even dare to long to feel good — you only dare to long to feel vindicated.
After attending a secret screening, I’m sorry to report that J.J. Abrams and Kathleen Kennedy have outsmarted you. They were one step ahead all this time. Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker does not exist. You get nothing. All that is left is the spectacle.
This is not the first review. The First Reviews are already out, the leaks are out. They are priming you with the imagery you will project onto the empty screen on the 20th. You know what they say about movies that withhold reviews until release day, right? That they are bad, right? Oh I bet you can’t wait to see just how bad.
Star Wars does no longer exist as a movie franchise. It barely ever did. It was an industrial empire. My spiritual guide and lifestyle guru Dr Don Jolly explains here in detail:
Do not be alarmed by the title, he’s really underselling himself. it’s a masterful piece of four dimensional augmented-reality-multi-media analysis, of the very kind that we need to engage in to understand how Brands function, today.
This man is the only man with a correct “take” on Star Wars, online. He is also right about Disney, and mainstream media in general. All discussion of Star Wars, the Brand, must build on top of this, or it is completely without value as anything but an unpaid advertisement. If you’re smart about it, you take a cut, but odds are, you’re not.
When George sold it, it ceased to be an industrial empire. It is today a virtual role-playing game akin to Pokemon go, or other such augmented-reality based video games. The fun is not watching Star Wars; It’s showing everyone online you did. Watching Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker is just getting an achievement that unlocks a new weapon for you to have fun with in the Culture War (The culture war is a(n augmented reality) clicker game.)
If you walk into Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker with the intention to relive your catharsis of watching the mister Plinket reviews, you will feel great disappointment. It’s just not the same. This is because you don’t care about Star Wars any more. Watching the trash fire will no longer keep you warm. Finding a new trash fire doesn’t help. You have confused the trash for the fire.
How can I say this? Because No One cares about Star Wars any more. You think there’s this mass of mindless drones “out there” who gobble up the trash without a second thought. This is a mirage, brought about by two things: one, our collective coming to terms psychologically with having the social internet in our lives, which results in what I call “Everyone Else”, or, “the Other’s Other”, meaning your idea of what (your idea of) The Other’s conception of “the other” is, manifesting as a mild paranoid delusion, and two, grifters who have identified and exploit this weakness in our shared psyche by making “content” that speaks to these anxieties. Reaction/drama/youtube talking heads/what have you.
The only exception to this is the few old people or extremely middlebrow 100 IQ types will watch it out of a sense of obligation, because it’s “just what you do”. there’s a new star war? You go watch it. But to call that “caring” would be a gross misuse of language.
And what’s more; strategically Not Making A Movie has put the final nail in the coffin of funny online video essays, who are going the way of the “angry reviewer who curses”. These assholes killed irony, by removing the object of irony. Now it’s all subjective.
All the reaction and commentary and analysis — it’s all over. It’s shallow and empty and unfulfilling, and will only grow more-so, because you don’t care about the thing that is being dissected. the only reason this began in the first place, was because you cared, and you felt hurt, because you had your hopes up and got disappointed. Well, I have good news and bad news: You are going to stay in this superposition of simultaneous cathartic disappointment and bitter schadenfreude forever.
The analysis and dissection was necessary because you had a lump in your stomach that needed to be removed to get better. Now you’re freezing to death, and losing track of your metaphors as you attempt to cope with living in a cultural environment of constant overwhelming stimulus.
I promise you this: If you actually, physically go and watch Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, in cinemas December 20th, you leave feeling like you’ve seen less of a movie, than if you just made some shit up.