Since I’ve got fuck all else to do while I’m down with this cold, here’s a rant:

The new movies are bad. Bad bad. Really, tediously bad.

Okay To be fair, the newest 3 movies have some great scenes in them. The battle of Crait and Luke, the Supremacy hyperspace jump, Porgs, the flying woman scene, the shiny woman that never comes up again after the first movie. Luke drinking raw green space cow milk (yeah, that happens).

But the rest, it’s just so meh. It falls flat, and it’s made all the worse because there’s some truly great ideas in it, then it gets all disney’d up. Seriously, their stand-in for Vader throws a temper tantrum in an elevator and then smashes up his helmet. The big evil twist is that, get this, the big evil sith is the protag’s father. No seriously, they do that again. And it’s palpatine this time, they brought him back because nobody could figure out how to make the BBEG ‘snoke’ actually scary. Oh, and Big Papa P’s evil plan? What if every ship had a death star laser mounted on it! Muahahaha! Oh and then Rey and Kylo… uh, pull a lightsaber out of their ears? That scene was baffling.

But I’ll confess that I do actually like Rey’s character and feel she is actually a decent addition to the Disney princess lineup, and as children’s movies go, they’re really not that egregious.

Anyways If you want genuinely good starwars content, The Mandalorian is incredible. It’s basically Lone Wolf And Cub, but in space, with an insane budget and gorgeous practical effects done by Legacy Effects, a company founded by Stan Winston’s four most prodigal students. As a puppetry and SFX nerd it’s an absolute buffet of beautiful content. Also they got Taika Watiti, Rachel Morrison and Jon Favreau to direct some of it, Werner Herzog guest stars (and yelled at them until they kept the puppet they were using for rehearsals instead of having a CG baby yoda), it’s actually just super fun.

After the 2nd season, the plot switches over to “The Book Of Boba Fett” (or as it’s popularly known, “Dances With Bantha”), a show I absolutely adore because someone finally, after years of us begging and pleading and signing petitions, finally let the Wookiepedia editors write a show. It’s not a good show, it must be said. In fact it’s so bad that it just stops in the middle to become The Mandalorian again for a few episodes, I assume so you don’t completely give up on it, but at least it’s short…! And to it’s credit it does actually really ‘humanize’ the native population of Tatooine, which is a big point in it’s favor.