The New Era Of STAR WARS, And Why I Parted Ways With It

On October 30, 2012, four years (and 1 day) ago, the new era of Star Wars began.

On this day, the big news was announced to the world: Disney had bought Lucasfilm, and a sequel Star Wars trilogy was confirmed, without George Lucas at the helm.

I think it's fair to say that almost everybody's mind was blown upon receiving this news. Disney buying Lucasfilm probably wasn't a huge surprise, given that they owned Marvel and Pixar at this point, but the real big news was the sequel trilogy announcement. Why?

While evidence points to George Lucas originally planning to tell his story in nine episodes, ever since Episode VI: Return of the Jedi was released in 1983 he had consistently stated that the Star Wars saga ended with that film, and if he made any more films, they would be prequels. After Episode III: Revenge of the Sith was finished in 2005, Lucas stuck to his claim that the saga was truly complete now. As late as January 2012, he pushed this assertion once again: "Why would I make any more, when everybody yells at you all the time and says what a terrible person you are?"

From what I've seen throughout the Internet, Lucas's quote is a very mild representation of the words that have been thrown at him since 1997. Although that isn't the point of this post, suffice it to say that I, as a longtime defender of Lucas's decisions in regards to the special editions and the prequel trilogy, was rather disheartened to see the Internet explode with mostly positive reactions to this sequel trilogy announcement, simply because it would be made without George Lucas at the helm.

My reaction to the Disney deal, however, was certainly not positive. I wouldn't necessarily say it was negative either(we'll get to that later), but more apprehensive than anything else. I truly felt that the Star Wars saga ended with Return of the Jedi, (even before the Disney deal, I never got into the Expanded Universe. I knew some of the stories, but I pretty much disregarded them from my head-canon) and I believed the story told over the six existing Star Wars films (at the time) would inevitably be tarnished in some way by a sequel trilogy, regardless of what the story would be. I actually initially considered boycotting the new films, but my family helped me to realize that that would be somewhat hypocritical of me. Without knowing anything about the sequels other than the fact that they were being made and George Lucas's part would simply be the story consultant (or so I was led to believe), boycotting them would essentially be me prematurely judging them because they didn't line up with my personal vision of how the Star Wars film saga should go.

Gee, that sounds awfully familiar...

I've seen multiple negative reviews of the prequels on IMDB with the prime justification for the negativity being "It should have been told this way!" So, you can see why I was convinced that boycotting the sequel trilogy would essentially make me a hypocrite, since the opinion I got from a lot of anti-prequel comments online was that the dislike stemmed from the films not aligning with the commenters' head-fanfiction, which was, in some cases, developed over the sixteen year period between Return of the Jedi and Episode I: The Phantom Menace.

It was only the moves Disney made after buying Lucasfilm that drove me to boycott the sequel trilogy for good.

It started in January 2013, when they cancelled the 3D releases of Episode II: Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith scheduled for that fall. I mentioned in my earlier post that I got rather angry about this and, for a time, fell into the "overly aggressive prequel fan trap": I wrote multiple essays on my Facebook in which I urged readers to follow my lead, and claimed that prequel fans were the "TRUE Star Wars fans." As I mentioned in my post from last month, unlike the sequels, the 3D releases were the ones I was actively looking forward to. At that point, I decided that if Disney was going to cancel what Lucas promised earlier and publish a BS reason behind it (I know that there likely were some proceeds and distribution issues between Disney and Fox, but their official statement that "100% of our efforts will focus on the new Star Wars trilogy" didn't fly with me given the circumstances: JJ Abrams had been announced as the director  of Episode VII only a few days before the 3D cancellation, and he was still busy promoting his latest Star Trek movie at the time, the script wasn't even close to being finished, the movie didn't begin production for another year, and both films were practically finished with their conversion process), I wasn't going to support their new Star Wars projects.

This decision was reinforced in the years leading up to Episode VII thanks to more actions on the part of Disney and the production crew of the film. After the 3D cancellation, they cancelled The Clone Wars show, then it was announced that George Lucas's story treatments for the sequels had been scrapped (meaning he had literally 0 say in how his story would continue), then the marketing campaign for the film kept harping on about how "This is true Star Wars, don't worry, we're not the prequels!" in some only slightly more subtle ways, then Simon Pegg, who publicly stated he has no respect for prequel fans, was revealed to have been the creative consultant... if just the 3D cancellation was enough to turn me away from the sequels, I felt even more justified in my decision after all that went down.

In spite of my reasons for doing so, maybe I am still a hypocrite for boycotting Episode VII. To this day, I have not seen the film and don't plan to. Maybe, much like those negative prequel reviewers on IMDB (and other places), I got too emotionally invested in a certain trilogy of films to really give the new era of Star Wars movies a chance. Maybe my refusal to watch Episode VII because of a few decisions made by the powers behind the film is no different that some people's refusal to buy Episode IV: A New Hope on DVD or Blu-Ray because Han doesn't shoot first. In my defense, however, I have not made any negative comments about Episode VII itself, or people who ended up liking it. This applies not only to this post, but to all Star Wars-related words I have said either online or in person since its release. Although I do know the basic plot summary of the film, I don't plan on revealing any of my thoughts on it. Those thoughts are severely impaired, because knowing the plot summary and seeing the movie for the whole experience are two different ballparks. At this time last year, I reflected on some of my aforementioned aggressive responses to Disney's actions on Facebook, admitting that urging fellow fans to boycott Episode VII and claiming myself to be a "true Star Wars fan" were the wrong things to say. I also wished my many friends who planned to see the film an enjoyable experience. You will never see me write a word of criticism about Episode VII (or its sequels and the Anthology films, as I'm not planning on seeing any of those either) and the story it tells. Who am I to judge a film I haven't seen?

I admittedly wish that none of the events of this new era of Star Wars had ever happened, but I've stopped being bitter about it. I've simply contented myself with the knowledge that I still have six excellent (in my eyes) films that tell a story that is already complete (again, in my eyes). Basically, I've moved on.

Did I still "allow this Dark Lord to twist my mind until I became the very thing I swore to destroy"? I think my arguments against that notion outweigh my arguments for it, but what do you think?