Star Wars: The Last Jedi

Let’s talk about Star Wars.

BLAAAAAA blablablaaaaaaa blablablabla blaBLAblablabla blaBLAblablabla blaBLAblablablaaaaaaa 

For a sandbox a galaxy wide, there has been little in the way of actual world building since Empire Strikes Back. For six films in a row, the Star Wars universe has been content to replay its greatest hits of Jedi, Death Stars and ultimate evils. From Return of the Jedi to Rouge One, despite what you think of the films themselves, they have traded on and amped up the icons of the first two. Any new addition (from Ewoks to Jar Jar) have been met with either scorn or derision. Common wisdom would dictate that a new Star Wars franchise would be wise to look back, enlarge the icons and play it safe.

This worked for Force Awakens. Disney and JJ Abrams held your hand, soothingly patted your head and gave you Han in the Falcon, a Jedi prodigy on a desert planet, X Wings on a Death Star, stormtroopers in the snow, a baddy in a mask and a bigger baddy behind him. You know this, they said as they produced a very good film, you like this.

Look. you like three things in this already! This is a film you'd like a lot!

This didn’t work (at least for me) in Rogue One. Dreary and loud, they gave you Peter Cushing’s CGI face, Tie Fighters, Death Stars and a very creakily voiced Darth Vader. My own views (too long, too dour, too reliant on your affection for the above) were not shared by the masses who enjoyed it. Doubling down on the glory days of A New Hope and Empire prove still to the be the key to box office gold. By all wisdom, The Last Jedi should have deified Luke, brought back Lando Calrissian, made Snoke that Sith Lord mentioned in the prequels and leaned into the iconography, hard.

Thank God Rian Johnson isn’t very wise.

We still get X Wings and Jedi and lightsabers and the Falcon, but let’s be crystal fox clear about this; this is not a rerun of Empire. Or Hope, Return, or the prequels. This is a breath of fresh air in a stuffy room. This is a glass of champagne in a desert. This is a bloody good film that tells you, calmly but firmly, to kill your heroes and make your own.

Rose is a maintenance worker, Finn a caretaker. Already, these aren’t the cool guys in the X Wings, they’re the background players brought forward by chance and luck. Ray is, literally, no one from nowhere. Kylo Ren is less a Vader, more a lost child wounded by his mentor’s distrust. Admiral Holdo is a beautiful, seemingly aloof leader who doesn’t take kindly to hot-headed flyboys. Poe himself is the handsome fighter pilot we’ve seen many times before, but his early heroics do not result in a gold star from Leia, but a prompt demotion and a scathing exchange about the value of dead heroes. General Hux is an easily and delightfully mocked lackey. Snoke doesn’t matter. Leia grows from snipping at Han in Force Awakens into a leader who inspires the women behind her (which in turn leads to the greatest twenty seconds of screen time in a blockbuster… ever? Ever, yeah, that fits).

I need three more films starring Laura Dern getting it done, five minutes ago

And Luke? Luke is a broken man. From his very first action (angrily tossing aside the icon of Star Wars) to his admittance of his greatest failure, he is snarky, sarcastic, belligerent and closed. He quickly loses the flowing white and grey robes from Force Awakens (Luke has always had style) for the much more practical Hermit Man Ensemble #3. He doesn’t show Ray how to swing a lightsaber or lift rocks, but about the actual nature of the Force; mostly that the Jedi choked on their own hubris and tried to control what does not belong to them. There should be no more gatekeepers to the magic of this world, and, one flash of Force power later, there aren’t. Mark Hamill is a tour de force in this, bringing his all to an unforgiving and harsh character shift. There is a moment when the wide eyed, happy-to-part-of-the-team-guys Luke is on show, and the transformation is astonishing. He is not Kenobi, or Yoda, or (God forbid) Qui Gon Jinn; Luke is a disappointment. It’s utterly intentional and astonishing to see something quite so daring.

My boy Skywalker is calling shenanigans on new Death Stars

The Last Jedi is a very daring film overall. It dares you to look closer at the antics of it’s characters and the world it perceives. It dares you to question its heroes again and again, Poe and Luke in particular. On the fun side quest to Kanto Byte, we see the rich get richer, the poor more destitute and yet hope remain in the fight for justice. The film dares you to resist the pull of nostalgia and dares you to look beyond the small parameters of what a Star Wars film can be. For a company and brand reliant on the very nostalgia it’s asking you to question, it’s one hell of a power move.

It’s still a Star Wars film; the delightful swipe edits, soaring John Williams score, cute critters and corny sense of humour are all present and correct. But where Force Awakens carefully held up a beautifully rose tinted mirror to what you love about Star Wars, The Last Jedi gleefully smashes it to bits.

But oh, do the pieces glitter brightly in the moonlight.

Jet Propelled Ravens: Travel in Game of Thrones

Six episodes into Game of Thrones Season Seven, this is my main take away so far:

ICE DRAGON THEY HAVE AN ICE DRAGON THERE'S AN ICE DRAGON NOW IT’S GONNA GO OOOOOFFFFFFF.

GET HYPE.

However, I was stunned (stunned I tell you, stunned) to find the vast majority of online chatter concerns not the glory of the ice dragon, the sweetness of Dany and Jon making gooey eyes at each other and the satisfaction of Cersei still pulling strong despite pre-season dismissal, but how long it takes for ravens to get from A to B. Have they all ingested some sort of jet fuel? Did the lesser known Tony of House Stark create tiny propellers for them? Is there a Westerosi Amazon Prime that we don’t know of? Because Season 7 is rattling along at a breakneck pace and, unfortunately, it’s shed some of its magnetism along the way.

Let’s look at how Game of Thrones used to show travelling. In the first season, Ned and Robert take the Kings Road from Winterfell to Kings Landing. Characters were carefully developed (this is the first time Joffrey is shown to be absolute oike of the first order) and relationships were established an enhanced. It took a hefty chunk of screen time, but by the time the party got to King’s Landing, not only had the scale of continent been established, but so had the characters.

This took about 3 episodes

Moving further on, one of my favourite parts of Season 5 was Verys and Tyrion cooped up together in a carriage winding its way across Essos towards Daenerys. Along the way, they wax philosophical, crack jokes and become such good company that, when they all separated, fear of death for the characters was outweighed by the knowledge that they wouldn’t share any more screen time together. 

This took the best part of Season 5

On a much smaller scale, take Cersei’s walk of shame from the Sept of Baelor to the Red Keep. Two major landmarks in the city are connected and the viewer was given a sense of scale of King’s Landing. There is the Sept, here is the castle, in between are the commoners. It showed that a person could walk the distance easily (in terms of distance that is, that walk was brutal) and also established the two power houses in King’s Landing, more so than the funerals and weddings in the Sept had before.

Seems less horrifying from this angle, too!

Taking time to travel, using these scenes as character and setting development, made Game of Thrones was it is. The world was shown to be big, gritty and populated. It showed that Westeros is not an easy land to travel. Shortcuts could not be found and, when characters went travelling, you knew that there was a very good chance they wouldn’t make it back. Basically, it added to the realism and jeopardy and it’s a vital part of the show’s DNA.

Now let’s look at travel in Season 7. Ayra Stark starts in the Riverlands (bumping into Ed Sheeran along the way), stops at Hot Pie’s gaff, meets her dire wolf in the snow and ends at Winterfell. The important difference from previous Ayra travels is that she is doing this alone. Where before she had Gendry and later on, the Hound, now she has no one to talk to, missing out on developing key development. When she gets to Winterfell, her go getting, ‘slay the enemies of my family’, can-do attitude hasn’t moved on from the end of Season 6.

However, she is now psychotically mistrustful of Sansa, terrorising her with faces and daggers and creepy, creepy games – how did this switch happen? Wasn’t she supposed to be all for family? The show has Petyr Baelish plant an incriminating letter as a catalyst, but it would have been much more successful for a travelling companion to change Ayra’s steadfast opinion on her family, as it would have done in previous episodes quite naturally. As it is, the viewer is expected to accept a massive character shift from Ayra with very little to work with.

And the ships! Euron Greyjoy goes from King’s Landing to Casterley Rock in what seems to be an afternoon. What previously took episodes worth of time is now covered in a single hour. The scale of the continent and the jeopardy of crossing it are sacrificed in order to get to the action quickly; this is not the Game of Thrones of old.

One episode. One. Episode. 

Which brings us to episode 6 of Season 7. Ooft. Let’s break it down. In the time Jon Snow and his Merry Men are stuck in a stand-off against the Night King (with no obvious supplies and the chill of winter literally surrounding them): Gendry runs back to the Wall; a raven is sent to Dragonstone; Daenerys argues with Tyrion; she flies beyond the Wall to save their frozen behinds.

How long were they there for? It was at least one night, as Thoros of Myr dies in his sleep. By that point, Gendry has reached the Wall, but after that, a raven needs to be found, sent and dragons need to come back. Was it another day? Exposed, with no food and no water? Characters weren’t shown to sleep, eat or drink, things which, again, would have been shown in earlier series. The realism of being trapped on a frozen lake is lost, and without the realism, there was no real tension.

It's been remarked upon by Alan Taylor (the director) that, whilst fans will happily eat up White Walkers, dragons and faces in bags, we’ve become quite the sticklers for time keeping. And though it is fun to nitpick, it means an important facet of the show has been lost. No longer do hero characters sleep, eat, or travel. They land where they need to be, do their thing and go home again. The glory days of Tywin Lannister needing the loo seem to be behind us. They don’t act like human beings anymore.

It’s not a deal breaker though. We’ve have years of these people travelling, talking, eating and sleeping. We’ve (well, myself at any rate) have come to know them like our own families. I trust the showrunners to stick the landing, tie the loose ends and have someone finally tell Jon Snow what his parent situation is.

Hopefully though, not by jet propelled raven.

Hamilton and Me

Hamilton.

Goddamn, Hamilton.

First time I heard about Hamilton – and I mean, literally the first time the name Alexander Hamilton crossed into my sphere of knowledge – was a funny bit on the Daily Show in 2009. President Obama had responded to criticism that he was an elitist by hosting a Spoken Word and Poetry Slam at the White House, to which Jon Stewart railed against in a segment called ‘Old Man Stewart Shakes His Fist at the White House Poetry Slam’. In it, edited clips of the Slam were met with an artfully timed raised eyebrow and an incredulous ‘You’re rapping about Alexander Hamilton? This is kinda ridiculous’ from Stewart. I watched, laughed and promptly forgot about it.

Years later, rumblings across the sea were occurring. There was a big new thing on Broadway, bigger than Book of Mormon, the previous Big New Thing on Broadway. The name Lin Manuel Miranda kept cropping up on Colbert and Conan O’Brien and elsewhere on my Youtube playlist. Miranda charmingly rapped on How I Met Your Mother. Miranda was on board for the new Clements and Musker Disney musical. Miranda wrote the song for The Force Awakens cantina scene. Miranda was a new hotness for Hollywood.

Then the album dropped, and the world turned upside down. Cast members flooded late night TV and therefore Youtube. Miranda rapped about Button Quinett on Colbert. He spoke about Puerto Rico at Congress and then rapped about it on John Oliver. The Grammys and Tonys and the Pulitzer came and all anyone seemed to talk about was Hamilton.

Come July 2016. In a queue for Cursed Child tickets (which I got, natch) I thought as I was going to be online for an extended length of time, I may as well check out this soundtrack that was blowing us all away.

So I listened. Then, two and a half hours later, I listened again.

Hillary Clinton had quoted Hamilton at the DNC. The Hamilton Mixtape with Usher and Busta Rhymes was well underway. The Clements and Musker Disney film was leaning heavily on Miranda’s name in its marketing. ‘He never gon’ be President now’ was quoted after every Trump scandal. It was, not to put to too fine a point on it, effing huge by the time I’d got round to it.

When I find something new I like, I have a tendency to let it consume my waking days. I went in hard and I’m only just really coming out of the other side of it. I bought the Ron Chernow book. I saw In The Heights. I wrote my own version of the opening number about Skara Brae for my class. I’ve tried (unsuccessfully) to get my nearest and dearest hooked. And tomorrow, tickets are available for the London show for those who signed up for the queue before October. There is a real chance that I will see this monster of a show in the near future and that’s so earth-shatteringly exciting that I had to write about it.

So there it is. The story of Hamilton and me. Some say that it’s too anti-British to play here, that it’s too Americanised and it has undertones of American Exceptionalism that go unchecked in a way that is uncouth and not to our sensitive British tastes. The theatre is elitist anyway, right? Who can afford to pay to go to London and see a musical?

All this is, quite frankly, bum. Tickets are paperless and can only be bought four at a time, so price gouging will not happen. London is so well connected to the barren wastelands of the North that anyone from anywhere in the country can get there. And the American Exceptionalism? Listen to the soundtrack and then we can talk.

Please God someone talk to me about Hamilton.