Attack of the trolls
“Star Wars,” other films react to online criticism.
Spoiler alert! The following reveals key plot points from “Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker.” Stop reading now if you don’t want to know.
When they say don’t feed the trolls, it’s implied that you shouldn’t make movies catered to their every whim, either.
Like politics and journalism, Hollywood movies inspire their fair share of abhorrent behavior online. These trolls aren’t just expressing negative views of a movie – they’re campaigning to take that movie down at the box office and to hurt the people who made it.
But in the quest to please all potential moviegoers, there seemingly has been an alarming trend in filmmaking of late that is trickling into theaters: creating films designed to satisfy the most hateful, abusive segments of the internet.
One of the most toxic group of fans online is a certain segment of the “Star Wars” fandom, and the new film will all but make them giddy. “Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker,” directed by J.J. Abrams, concludes the latest trilogy about the Skywalker clan that was last seen onscreen in 2017’s “The Last Jedi,” directed by Rian Johnson. “Jedi” is a film that is systemically hated by many trolls. “Skywalker” makes many choices that are counter to what “Jedi” established and contains so much fan service it might as well have been made by them.
Many complaints about “Jedi” are either subtly or overtly sexist and racist. The men are emasculated. The women are too powerful. The characters of color don’t belong. Rey can’t be important if her parents were junk traders. Many complaints are more about story and character, arguing that the film flew in the face of “Star Wars” tradition and broke the rules of the universe. An altright troll claimed credit for tanking the film’s audience score on popular review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes (the site has denied this), and there was intense racist, sexist harassment aimed at Kelly Marie Tran, who played Resistance fighter Rose Tico.
It’s an awfully big coincidence that so many of the gripes about “Jedi” from the bowels of the internet were heeded in “Skywalker.” It’s a coincidence that Tran’s Rose is sidelined completely in this film. It’s a coincidence that Rey suddenly is the granddaughter of Emperor Palpatine. It’s a coincidence that Han (Harrison Ford), Luke (Mark Hamill), Lando (Billy Dee Williams) and even Wedge Antilles (Denis Lawson) all return, some from beyond the grave.
Whether or not “Skywalker” was a direct response to the backlash against “Jedi,” it undeniably is a retreat from the risks Johnson took with that film, landing the franchise so safely it becomes boring and messy. The film looks and feels as if it was designed by committee, with too many acts, too many fight scenes and too little emotional resonance. It was trying to please everyone and offend no one.
This trend goes beyond “Star Wars.” Two films that haven’t even been released, “Sonic the Hedgehog” and “Ghostbusters: Afterlife,” are heading down this path.
“Sonic” (in theaters Feb. 14) admittedly has been influenced by online reaction. When the first trailer for the liveaction film about the video-game character was released online, the backlash was swift and vitriolic. Fans took issue with the humanoid appearance of the CGI Sonic. The response was loud enough, apparently, that the studio reversed course, with director Jeff Fowler tweeting that the character would be redesigned.
“Ghostbusters: Afterlife” will be the second attempt at revisiting the 1980s “Ghostbusters” franchise. The first was Paul Feig’s 2016 reboot “Ghostbusters,” featuring a primarily female cast, which became a slight box-office disappointment and the victim of an organized troll campaign, particularly a racist one directed at star Leslie Jones.
“Afterlife” (out July 10) is headed by original director Ivan Reitman’s son Jason and stars Paul Rudd, and the first trailer revealed a somber tone with little levity. The message to fans of the Feig movie appeared to be: The studio didn’t take “Ghostbusters” and the man children who cried that it “ruined their childhoods,” seriously enough. Now just look how seriously they’re taking it.
As loud as online voices can be, they usually are not indicative of what the greater population thinks. Hatred for “Jedi” is a distinctly online phenomenon. Despite a low user rating on Rotten Tomatoes, the movie received an “A” from moviegoers on Cinemascore. The movie didn’t make as much money as “The Force Awakens,” but it did make a cool $1.3 billion at the global box office.
It seems uncanny, bad for business and terrible for storytelling for any kind of mass-produced product to try to capture the attention of so few people. The rest of us are left wanting. “Skywalker” is being eviscerated by critics in large part because of its undoing of “Jedi.” How many more movies can we redesign via trending Twitter topics?
Although the “Sonic” director explicitly stated his movie’s redo was the result of online response, we can’t know for sure about “Ghostbusters” or “Skywalker.” And there is the slim possibility that the first trailer for “Ghostbusters” could be a head fake in terms of its tone.
But even if the storytelling choices had nothing to do with the online discourse, they skirt too close to it. Like a child who throws a tantrum in the store for a piece of candy, we shouldn’t reward those who abuse internet platforms with movies curated to their tastes, even if the parent was going to give the kid the candy bar anyway. It doesn’t help make good movies, it doesn’t help clean up the internet wasteland, and it certainly isn’t helping casual moviegoers enjoy a well-produced film.