I FIND YOUR LACK OF FAITH...DISTURBING!!!
OBI WAN IS THE LATEST ENTRY IN THE DISNEY "AFTER WARS" SAGA AND IT'S GRADE "A" GARBAGE.
I’m going to get straight to the point. Disney Plus is destroying Star Wars. They began their merciless attempts at sullying an otherwise superior film franchise by entrusting it’s future to J.J Abrams. Abrams who was little more than a fancy carnival barker who could not write his way out of a paper bag and who famously single handedly destroyed the Star Trek franchise (Look up Kelvin Timeline on Google)…was rewarded with carte blanche over this beloved film trilogy and took a steaming dump in this imaginative Hollywood sandbox. How the fuck does that happen? How do we as a society reward ineptitude? J.J Abrams has literally been allowed to incompetently muddle his way through the absolute disintegration of two fan favorite intellectual properties and nobody seems to notice or care. I guess we should also mention Kathleen Kennedy who was awarded the title of Star Wars “consigliere” when George Lucas said the hell with everything in the wake of the well intentioned but corosive CLONE SAGA and sold the entire joint to the Mouse House. She is the primary agent in the demise of STAR WARS …her desire to make the “Force” female is admirable yet puerile and counter-intuitive at the same time. Her choice of JJ Abrams to helm the final three sacred episodes of the original Lucas cycle are the closest thing to sacrilege I have ever witnessed. The eventual massacre of Rian Johnson’s LAST JEDI was a resounding indictment of Kennedy’s poor judgement and carelessness as far as the legacy of Star Wars and it’s respected canon. THE RISE OF SKYWALKER is an embarrassing corporate hack film that should be a prime example of why less than deserving talent should never be allowed to have a say so about the direction of a gargantuan financial blockbuster trilogy the likes of Star Wars. JJ Abrams obliterated the chance to reunite the holy trinity of Luke, Han and Leia in the FORCE AWAKENS…he cowardly backed out of directing the second film because he realized he had zero tricks left in his “hack bag” which leads to Rian Johnson’s bitch ass offering…THE LAST JEDI. Was anybody in the test screenings saying…"Ay guys…this is some bullshit…we can’t honestly show this to our fans…they will drag us for days.” “Which one of you jackass writers came up with a mother fucker named Finn? Like Huckleberry Finn? And he’s a black stormtrooper in charge of sanitation on the new Death Star?!!! Hell no. Back to the drawing board. And tell Mr. Abrams thanks but no thanks.”
Since the much maligned “AFTER WARS” saga completed itself and skulked off into the sunset of “We shit the bed” film franchise fuck ups…Disney was able to produce two Star Wars spinoff joints that I actually enjoyed. ROGUE ONE was thematically a remix with fantastic execution…it gave me a “new hope” for the future direction of the franchise. SOLO was the next experiment in the short-lived STAR WARS ONE SHOTS and I could already tell that the project was going to go belly up when Lord and Miller, the braintrust behind The Lego Movie and Into the Spiderverse, were ejected from that production with a quickness and replaced by the more corporate and at this point in his career, malleable, Ron Howard. SOLO came and went like a fart in the wind. Truth be told, there shouldn’t have been a standalone flick about Han Solo…the movie was okay but nobody asked for an epic, big budget flick explaining the comeuppance of Han Solo. Nobody. I love Han Solo, Chewbacca and Lando. I also love Princess Leia and the droids. Shit, I like Jawas and the Mos Eisley Cantina…but I don’t want to see an entire movie about any one of those characters. Those characters were constructed to carry the story and embellish the background for the main players in STAR WARS, namely Luke Skywalker…Darth Vader…Obi Wan Kenobi…you know, the movers and shakers in the Star Wars Universe. SOLO wasn’t bad…it was just unnecessary.
And then came the bounty hunters. Along with Jon Favreau and Dave Filoni. I’m not big on Star Wars animated stuff…I’ve tried getting into it during the pandemic. Order 66 is kind of an interesting concept but it’s never really worked for me. Most of the stuff that people rave about concerning the Filoni-Verse is pardon my use of this heavy cliche, elevated fan service. The CLONE WARS material had bits and pieces of cool things in them…and most of the time it felt like STAR WARS, but I kept thinking to myself that George Lucas’s influence was waning. The CLONE WARS movies had a chance to captivate a generation and they did. My kids grew up with Qui-Gon Jinn and Obi-Wan as their Star Wars heroes…and as a family we quite enjoyed The Phantom Menace. I understood the nature of what George Lucas was trying to do…but I think at that point he may have been surrounded by too many YES-MEN and because of that he made several major mistakes that led to the erosion of his fabled universe. But that’s a discussion for another time…the point I was making was Filoni had swooped in and done some damage control with the IP in the animated sphere and managed to re-capture the fans who were hardcore and hungering for Star Wars content. He made the Star Wars canon created in the CLONE WARS palatable for even some of the most jaded STAR WARS fans. Favereau introduces us to The Mandalorian next and I must tell you that for what it is…a story about a lone gunslinger in space kind of like Kung Fu meets Fist Full of Dollars…I have loved every minute of it. BOOK of BOBA FETT not so much but even that had it’s fun moments. These recent iterations of STAR WARS are fine but people who crave STAR WARS are usually interested in the mysticism behind it all. The spaceships are dope…the battles and far flung alien vistas are on point and ray blasters and droids are always fun. But the meat and potatoes of my interest in the SWU (STAR WARS UNIVERSE) revolves around the Jedi and the Sith. The Old Republic. These are concepts people have been dying to see and with the unveiling of this new OBI WAN show on DISNEY PLUS…I was optimistic…hopeful even that finally we would be given a definitive JEDI story sans Baby Yodas and CGI Luke Skywalkers.
OBI WAN is more “Disney Star Wars” garbage. I hate to say it. But off the rip in the first two episodes that launched last week, anyone can see that this show is a jump off for other characters and the actors that play them. The only thing that is halfway redeeming about OBI WAN is the presence of Ewan Mcgregor. Other than that…we find ourselves once again back on fucking Tattoine (because where else do mf’s go in the SWU when they want to hide out?)…the Jedi have all been executed or have fled to different corners of the galaxy and Obi Wan has chosen the desert planet to exile himself on while watching over a young Luke Skywalker who’s now being raised by Aunt Beru and Uncle Owen. There are these things called Inquisitors…and of course they hunt Jedi. They all look like they raided Darth Vader’s wardrobe and walk around with a kind of faux Imperial bravado. They want to be feared and respected…but we’ve seen this done better before by Giancarlo Esposito in THE MANDALORIAN or Christoph Walz in Inglorious Bastards opening scene. We also can easily tell from their appearance who these characters are in terms of agenda: the sassy, badass black chick who doesn’t follow orders and is overpowered…the solemn Asian stereotype who says very little but dutifully carries out his orders and the omnious bald leader of the trio who has a faint British accent and talks a good game but in the end is weak af. Of course these Jedi Hunters are looking for Obi Wan and it’s established early on in the game that, Reva, the super cringe Inquisitor , has a hard on for Obi Wan Kenobi and is actually chastised by the bald inquisitor for focusing so much on one mark. Of course Reva snaps back at him with some disrespectful retort and as a lifelong STAR WARS fan I fully expected that quip to be her last one. Old girl is about to be a FORCE GHOST real quick up in this piece talking like that. To my surprise…she is not force choked or slammed by the lead Inquisitor…quite the contrary, both of her fellow Inquisitors take her tongue lashing multiple times throughout the first episode.
I guess the thing I disliked most about an OBI-WAN-KENOBI show is that if you are going to take one of the trilogy’s greatest characters and exploit his character arc, please do so with gusto and make that joint epic. Take special measures with the writing to insure we are getting canonically respectful stories that match up with the weight of this character. I was going to do a full blow by blow review of this series but it doesn’t deserve all of the time it will take me to rip the complete innards out of its corpse. The very last episode touched me a little when during the brawl for it all…the fight we thought would never happen (because according to Lucas, Darth Vader and Obi Wan don’t see each other again after the Clone Wars until The Death Star) Ewan Mcgregor finally sheds a tear realizing what part he’s played in creating the scourge of the galaxy out of the young and bright pupil that was once Annakin Skywalker. They also do something really haunting with the sound design in this scene…after Obi-Wan finally displays some mastery over the force in a convincing way and all but beats the brakes off of a young Darth Vader, Vader’s helmet is cracked and we get a glimpse of pallid countenance. The face peering out of the fissure in his helm is a demonic one and this vision is aided and abetted by a voice that fluctuates between Hayden Christensen’s and James Earl Jones. He tells Obi Wan in so many words not to blame himself for Annakin’s fate…blame the Sith and ultimately Darth Vader for disposing of Annakin. This was the kind of thing I was looking for from a Obi Wan series and sadly once again, like a poor marksman…Disney keeps missing the mark.