The lightsaber doesn’t make sense. So what? Since when did Star Wars have to make sense? After Gravity and Interstellar, I’m glad it doesn’t make sense. If you’ve given up hope for the upcoming Star Wars sequels because the technology doesn’t make sense, you’re missing the point. You probably don’t remember Episode I coming out. You want grit in your sci-fi, not absurdity, and God forbid if there’s even the tiniest bit of sound or fire in space.
One could make the argument the 21st-century generation of moviegoers just isn’t cut out for Star Wars. These are people that get their minds blown by plotlines about dreams within dreams within dreams, not insane space drama. But if the sequels were some Chris Nolan-ass bullshit, that would be a pretty bleak way to end the greatest sci-fi franchise of all time. Plus the people most excited about this movie are probably the people who were around for Episode I and were disappointed by it.
The trailer gave me hope. It’s filled with fun, silly things, things that would be cliché if Nolan hadn’t taken a giant desaturated shit over blockbusters with those Batman movies he probably doesn’t want you to call Batman movies. There’s cheesy orchestral music. There’s an over-dramatic narrator. There’s color, something missing from recent blockbusters because, once again, Nolan and his monochrome caca. And most importantly, there’s stuff that doesn’t make sense.
Let’s compare the Star Wars trailer to the post-Nolan industry’s best shot at a “fun” blockbuster – Guardians of the Galaxy. That movie was supposed to be the kind of absurd sci-fi brain-rotter Star Wars was in the ’70s, and it worked pretty well. But its color palette is as grey as any Nolan movie, and the only character that’s even close to as instantly likable as the fucking robot head on a soccer ball that appears for two seconds in the Star Wars trailer was an overconfident thirty-something music nerd.
Maybe Star Wars: Episode VII will suck. But if it does, it won’t be because it’s boring, and it won’t be because the technology doesn’t make sense. If you’re mad because the lightsaber is impractical or because Millennium Falcon isn’t aerodynamic enough to do those flips, you should stay away from this movie. You should find some movie where Michael Fassbender and Chloe Sevigny remind you God is dead, not a movie about goddamn space wizards.