[Warning: this post contains strong language and a minor spoiler about a movie that you really shouldn’t go see anyway.]

Every Star Wars movie after Empire Strikes Back has sucked.

Return of the Jedi was the worst of the original trilogy. Lucas was trying to wrap up everything into a nice, neat package and forgot that the movie needs to be entertaining. There are some entertaining moments in ROTJ, but overall, it’s the weakest link.

The Ewoks are too cute. The dialogue with the Emperor is painful, and the ending part where Vader dies was truly groan-worthy as he endeavored to have a “After-School Special” moment with Luke.

“But there were problems in the first two movies too!” Yes, there were. If you go back and watch A New Hope, you will hear some truly awful lines of dialogue. Luke whines. Han talks about how fast the Millennium Falcon is using a unit of time instead of a unit of speed. And you know what else? Shut up.

Yes, shut up. When you saw the movies, even when they re-released them in the 90s, you didn’t care about the few bad lines. You didn’t care about what a dumb name the “Hyperdrive Motivator” was. Why didn’t you care? Because the movie was still pretty good.

Even when I was watching ROTJ, I could smell the rot.

Then.

Then.

Then Lucas went back. And tweaked them. Which is to say that he added all these little cutaways. Most of them were completely useless. Most of them were designed to get a cheap laugh. Most of them had nothing to do with furthering the story.

Take, for example, the scene with Han Solo and Jabba from Episode 1. The scene was cut from the original movie, and had actually been filmed with an actor playing Jabba instead of the giant slug he became.

But Lucas would not be stopped. He wanted to add the scene, so he was going to add it. And who is going to stop him, after all, he’s George “Swingin’ Dick” Lucas. You gonna tell him ‘no’?

So what do we get? We get a scene which adds nothing to the movie, nothing to the series.

Oh, and I forgot. In the original scene, Han walked behind the actor who was playing Jabba. Now Jabba has been replaced by a giant slug, so Lucas has Han step on Jabba.

Right. Like Jabba wouldn’t have resented that at all. No response.

So after deproving (the opposite of “improving”) the first three movies, Lucas set out to make three more.

Which gave us Jar Jar Binks.

How did Jar Jar get approved? Because Lucas didn’t have anyone to say, “Um George, the Rastafarian swamp lizard thing is not only offensive, but annoying as hell.”

You’ve got the leader of the Gungans who vigorously shakes his head and spews spittle everywhere when he’s excited, upset or happy. Yeah.

My Theory As To What When Wrong

The long delay between the first trilogy and the second trilogy was explained by Lucas’ contentious divorce from his wife. The story went that he didn’t want to give his wife any money from the future movies, and she wanted to say they were products of the marriage, so she was owed half.

I don’t know if there’s any truth to that or not, but I can tell you that what ruined the second trilogy was very clear to me:

Lucas had grandchildren.

He made the second trilogy for them.

Don’t believe me? Watch them with a 6-year old. I have. Again, and again, and again.

Little kids love Jar Jar. I’m not sure what the medical explanation for this is, but I believe it has to do with the soft-spot on the top of the head not being hardened.

Ask him which of the 6 movies he wants to watch, and he’ll pick one of the first 3.

The awful dialogue between Anakin and Padme doesn’t bother him; he’s 6.

The goofy stupidity of having battle droids that say things like “Roger Roger” and “Uh Oh” doesn’t bother him; he’s 6.

The absolute absurdity of having General Grievous, who is 99.99% robot, who has a hacking smoker’s cough doesn’t bother him; he’s 6.

When Count Dooku and Yoda face off, and Dooku says “It is obvious we will not be able to settle this with the force, but with the lightsaber” he doesn’t ask “WHO TALKS LIKE THAT?!” because he’s 6.

When you have Chancellor Palpatine saying “No, no, no, no” like some bizarre scarecrow, he doesn’t care.

So if the majority of the movie is entertaining to a 6 year old and annoying to the rest of the population, either Lucas is amazingly stupid, or he wrote it for 6 year olds — like his grandchildren.

What Went Right

The good parts of the second-trilogy is quite simply the battle scenes. Lucas does them well. It’s why the Death Star invasion at the end of the 1977 movie was so good, why the Hoth battle and Luke-vs-Vader in Empire was so good, and why the best parts of ROTJ were the battle scenes.

In the second-trilogy, we get a multitude of light-saber battles, including Darth Maul, whose lightsaber battle with Qui Gon
and Obi-Wan is by far the best part of The Phantom Menace, and why the Jedi battles are the best parts of the next two.

Which Brings Us To Today

We went to Clone Wars because of the aforementioned 6-year old, but I was hopeful. I wasn’t bothered by the fact that it was all-CGI. As many others have said, a lot of the second-trilogy was CGI anyway, so why not just go all-out?

What did we get?

Some good battle scenes.

But not enough.

Not nearly enough.

The 6-year old loved it.

I did not.

First of all, the story starts and you’re not given any help figuring out where this movie fits in. If you are expecting it to be after the last movie, you’d be wrong — as you would soon figure out. Eventually I figured out that it was between the 2nd and 3rd movies.

Which, by the way, makes this a… what? Prequel? Prequel to a prequel? I don’t think we even have a word for what this is.

My hope started to die off fast. The voiceover at the very beginning of the movie is so far over the top that it puts us squarely in the ridiculous. It isn’t quite as bad as the “SUNDAY SUNDAY SUNDAY! MONSTER TRUCK PULL” guy, but it’s close enough that the comparison came quickly to my mind.

There’s plenty of gawd-awful dialogue that makes you wonder if the writers have ever been in a discussion with normal human beings here on earth. Fortunately, we are not asked to endure any of the bile-chunk laden, vomit-inducing “romantic” language between Anakin and Padme.

But It Gets Worse

I had heard that there was a “new Hutt” in this movie who “speaks like Truman Capote” and I thought “Oh man, people are just getting way over-wrought about this before it is even released.” And then I kind of forgot about it.

Until it happened, and all I could think was “OH MY SWEET BUTTERY JESUS, YOU HAVE GOT TO BE [EXPLETIVE] [EXPLETIVE] [EXPLETIVE] [EXPLETIVE] [EXPLETIVE] KIDDING ME, RIGHT?”

Let me be absolutely clear: imagined someone playing Truman Capote. Now imagine that the director asked you to “Gay it up a little.” And you did. Now, imagine that he said “No, more. Really really gay it up.” And you did. Then imagine the director kidnapped your family and held them at gunpoint and threatened to scar and/or rape them with a cattle-prod unless you made it so amazingly over-the-top that people would actually lose brain cells as they tried to imagine if you had really CREATED SUCH AN OBSCENE CARICATURE.

Did I mention this character was a Hutt aka giant slug?

The only way this character could be any more ridiculous is if he was wearing a pink-tutu and delivered his dialog in stuccato bursts between thrusts as he was sodomized by The Village People as they sang “I Feel Pretty” in four-part harmony.

Oh, and guess what? He turns out to be a bad guy.

Um “spoiler alert.”

Sorry. Actually I’m not. There’s no way this movie could be spoiled. You could set this movie on fire and urinate on the ashes and not ruin it.

But since the cat is out of the bag, isn’t it nice that Lucas created over-the-top gay caricature “uncle” who turns out to be a bad guy?

Way to be creative there, Georgey boy. So, can we expect that someday you’ll go back and release a “Special Edition” of The Phantom Menace where Jar Jar is smokin’ weed and listening to Bob Marley while cleaning a rifle wearing a Che Guevara t-shirt? Because that would be less-offensive.

Please, let this movie fail

The only hope we have for this to be the last Star Wars movie is if it is a horrible box-office failure. (Or have an asteroid land on George Lucas.)

Please, do your part.

Do not see this movie.

If anyone asks you about this movie, tell them you heard it was horrible, painful to listen to and offensive. Even if you don’t care about the stereotyping (really?), you should care about good movie making.

Star Wars, which was once the pinnacle of science-fiction movie making, became a bad joke with the second trilogy, and is now a bad, unfunny joke — which is to say, tedious.

It needs to end now. It needs to be put into a nice retirement community where it can bask in the glow of What Used To Be, until some new director can come up with a vision of what a great action/science-fiction adventure can be for this generation.

Just keep Lucas the hell away from it, because the stench from the shit on his hands will ruin the whole thing.