As an aforementioned first-generation fan from the Star Wars O.G. (1977, baby, Bicentennial behind us, Vader was lying, nobody dressed up in line, tickets were a buck-fifty and Han Shot First), it might seem strange to start off a piece about the recent box-office fate of "Solo: a Star Wars Story" with a Star Trek reference, but just go with me on this for a moment:
In one episode from the original 1960's Trek series, Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock and Dr. McCoy beam down onto a planet about to be destroyed, and into what seems to be a giant archive library of electronic disks. As the librarian, Mr. Atoz (get it?) explains, each disk is an encyclopedic entry on planetary history, and controls a time portal back to that period--And the reason no one else is there to meet them is that the entire planet has been evacuating the disaster by escaping back into the previous past era of their choice...Or, at least, that's all he has time to explain, before his own "gotta run!" exit leaves them just as confused as before. It won't stop the planet's sun from going supernova, but at least everyone could now safely go somewhere where they can stall it off for a few hundred or thousand years and let it become somebody else's problem.
It's not as crazy science-fiction as it sounds. In fact, too many of us seem to be doing it right this very moment.
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The current headline that's left the movie industry reeling for the last ten days--in an oddly absent movie summer where every hit seems to be giving each other a wide berth and safely staying out of each other's way--was the rug-pulled no-show box-office opening for "Solo: a Star Wars Story", which opened to an all-time low of $90M on the usually sacred Memorial Day, dropping to an even more embarrassing $29M the second week.
Well, a Star Wars movie tanking at the box-office on launch, that-there's stuff that just shouldn't usually happen--Over the week in between, the industry scrambled for an explanation, with producer Kathleen Kennedy blaming bad weather and the holiday weekend. (Which was a bit ironic, considering how Fox first tried to use Memorial Day to "bury" the 1977 Star Wars forty years ago, hoping everyone would be at the beach.)
Some fans went the quick route, saying that while the movie had the screenwriter of "Empire Strikes Back" and a director who'd worked with George Lucas in the past, new actor Alden Ehrenreich was just too uncharismatic a lump to step into Harrison Ford's shoes.
Most core Star Wars fans, still reeling from the unholy self-indulgent train wreck of last December's "Episode VIII: the Last Jedi", were quick to grab writer-director Rian Johnson by the scruff of the neck, hold him up next to Kennedy's need to make the stories more "socially inclusive", and shout "It's THEIR fault for ruining the whole thing!"...Which is not, we should say, far off.But critics were a little more incisive in their complaints: Columnist Joshua Rothman for the New Yorker called the Solo movie "Distressingly forgettable...A Star Wars movie about Nothing, like a Seinfeld episode with hyperdrive". Joe Morgenstern of the Wall Street Journal called it "Dramatic neutrality", where "Action of no great consequence grinds on". Critic A.O. Scott of the NY Times shrugged off the "Low-stakes blockbuster" fun, but called the story's need to backstory every unexplained reference from Eps. IV and V "A filmed Wikipedia page".
And it's Rothman's New Yorker column that seems to have nailed as many of the reasons as any: The Star Wars universe felt "empty" with no one hero to follow anymore. It was a setting of people, creatures, identifiable pop-lore references and occasionally battles, ones we expected from a big famous brand name, but nothing that took us anywhere anymore. A wandering nobody with "no people" stumbled into scoundrel company, learned to pilot a ship, met two loyal sidekicks who figure in more important later stories, and became at the end of the movie...pretty much who he was at the start. We know LATER that he'll go on to great things, but that's another movie. And you wouldn't know that, of course, unless you'd seen them already.
The reason that it doesn't quite feel like an epic Star Wars saga may probably be because of the other big name we'd all heard forty years ago when the first movie opened. Oh, we all heard about George Lucas...And if we were watching PBS stations on pledge drives for the next twenty years, we also heard about the philosophical author of the books Lucas claimed he had been inspired by: Joseph Campbell.
In his book The Hero With a Thousand Faces, Campbell outlined how every mythic-saga hero in cultural history, from myth and fairytale to Beowulf, to King Arthur, to Frodo Baggins, to, well, Luke Skywalker, the hero's adventure is a life-changing journey that is like maturity itself: The hero starts from nothing, and must leave it or see it destroyed before he can search the world for what will make him complete--He will receive advice or even magical help from a fatherlike mentor steeped in ancient traditions, he will have sidekicks who may even be inspired to find their own selves by lending support, and, like Luke's final lightsaber duel, he has to overcome his own personal demons or failings and conquer them before he can be worthy of getting his prize.
In a 70's where cynical Clint Eastwood antiheroes had become the "relevant" norm, the Campbell-worship in Lucas's first Star Wars (it wasn't "Ep. IV" or "A New Hope" back then) was praised for its "Modern mythic" quality, and even accused of being a deliberate old-Hollywood throwback to the 30's-serial Flash Gordon days, when heroes were Heroes.Without the Hero's Journey, and what he finds at the end of it, you do not have a Story. I'm not exactly sure what you have--whether it's a diary, a tangential anecdote, or, as the NY critic said, a footnote analysis of somebody else's story--but it's simply not something you can apply the more familiar word to. Unless you happen to be Atreyu or Falkor, there is no such thing as a Neverending Story.
And that's a problem for studios at the moment: They were sort of counting the next years' strategies on stories not ending.
Particularly after most of them did--Warner had the good fortune back at the beginning to luck onto multi-filmed serials of Harry Potter and Peter Jackson's "Lord of the Rings" adaptation, which were already in-production to deliver one film of the open-ended books' chapters per year. And execs in 2001 now had the one-two punch of knowing exactly what money they would make in 2003 and 2004 before they'd even made it, a strategy they've applied ever since.
A strategy they later believed in the 10's they were copying from Marvel's success with interconnected and serialized big and little movies all telling the "universe" of one big TV-series like story--Not realizing that Marvel was simply adapting what they'd written for fifty years: Ongoing magazines meant to get you to buy the next issue, or story-crossover issues of another magazine. What Marvel did, they did for a living.
Harry and Frodo were characters in the more traditional kinds of books, and as Joe reminded us, books end after the hero finds what he was looking for. Studios (including Warner's original contract deal to write more Harry Potter stories without JK Rowling, even after there was no more Voldemort to fight) believed they could turn a story into a Brand Name, by telling us everything else that had happened. And, if living Happily Ever After, or dying, happens to be the major stumbling block, everything else that happened, happened....before. And to everybody else, whose stories were glossed over the first time around--Hey, ancient mentors and flawed sidekicks are people too, y'know!
Studios needed to promise the public More--Especially when it was looking more and more like they wouldn't be able to deliver it. And fans, being of the right age when more hamburgers and more cookies sound better than Less of them, thought they wanted More. But in writing, More is not always Better...It's just more, like more paper clips on your desk, or more lint in your closet. One of the first things your freshman writing teacher drilled into your ambitious high-school head was "Kill your darlings"--Not EVERYTHING you think up belongs in a story, and sometimes the hardest work in telling a story is in knowing what part of the story not to tell, and the narrative will be clearer to the reader for what you remove. (A screenwriting concept Michael Bay and M. Night Shamalyan have apparently never heard of in their entire lives, but that's another issue.)
Think of any classic story: Would Cinderella be a better tale if we had a lengthy flashback to when Cindy's parents were still alive, or if we saw what happened to the Stepmother's previous husband? Would Robin Hood be a more compelling adventure if we saw the origin of how the Sheriff of Nottingham rose to power? Would Hamlet be a more effective tragedy if we had a flashback of the close relationship he had with his dad when still alive and king, or if we followed the side adventures of Rosencrantz & Guildenstern?...Er, oops, wait, think someone's already written that play.The narrative is clearer when we know the answers to the question the reader will ask...Who is the main character? What does he want? When does he start to go after it and how does he plan to do it? And what are we to take away from the story in the end into our own experiences, that we'll care whether or not he finds it?
To tell the eight, nine, ten, or however ultimately-many chaptered story of Star Wars, you have to ask the same question the Prequel trilogies brought up: Just who the heck's saga IS this, anyway? Is it Luke's? Is it Anakin's? Is it both?--Is it about how Luke redeemed Anakin, or how Anakin was redeemed by Luke? Is it the robots'? Is it Obi-Wan's? Is it Boba Fett's? Or is it Solo's, who isn't even mentioned at all in the first three episodes?
And that question, Campbell already answered: It is the saga of the hero we follow because he is Us. He may have friends, he may have a mentor, and he may have help, but if the story was about them, we'd know it from the beginning, wouldn't we?
But instead, we think we want to come back to More Star Wars, whomever it's about, because, like Marvel or Pixar, a reputation-proven brandname is one of the last remaining safe-houses to come back to at the cineplex. We feel nowadays as if we can't expect good new movies anymore, so keep the OLD good ones alive as long as we can.
Like Mr. Atoz's planetary library-patrons, we audiences have also become like those studios: All the good old stories had endings, and good new ones seem to be less and less forthcoming every year. So we evacuate to a Summer '18 with another story of Pixar's Incredibles, more adventures in a newer, bigger Jurassic Park, a new heist for a new Oceans '11 gang, and more thrills that remember how cool it was to go to a theater in 2004, 1993, and 2001. Those were good years...But they're not 2018, 2019, or 2020, and they sure as heck aren't 2021 or 2022.With only a brick wall at the end of the tunnel, the train speeding up, and studios seeking only movies the audience already knows by name and can identify--namely favorite old ones--the audience can only loop, re-loop, and re-re-loop itself into the favorite past of its choice, trying to survive in old movies when new movies can't deliver anymore, until it realizes a basic problem: The past is not a future. Saying "Here's another part of the story we forgot to tell you twenty years ago" is not going to stop an industry of Today from blowing up around their ears.
And the stories that Yesterday had to tell are just not all that interesting, when you're living in Today and know what the characters don't.
It's just not that much fun to see a character who knows less about his own story than we already do. If the hero has no new journey to go on, what will we ever find on ours?
