Star Wars: The Last Jedi has been killed off by PC culture. No really, people actually think that

Bad enough that it has a prominent black character in it, and the fact that 'The Last Jedi' basically belongs to Rey, a woman. But now there’s a new cast member who’s a Vietnamese-American too!

James Moore
Thursday 21 December 2017 13:00 GMT
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Star Wars - The Last Jedi Trailer

This will be my last column for Independent Voices because, well, I’m dying with shame. I’ve helped to kill Star Wars!

Y’see, I’m one of those rotters who identify with the liberal left, think diversity is a good thing and enjoy movies with casts and characters that don’t look as if they could have come straight out of Ukip central casting or the Trump White House.

Not content with fighting a war on Christmas and allowing women to go out to work, we’ve now set out to destroy people’s childhood by wrecking everything they loved about the world’s biggest movie franchise. Has there ever been a greater crime?

By now you’re probably aware of the disparity between the critics’ take on Star Wars: The Last Jedi (92 per cent fresh as of this morning) and the audience score (54 per cent) on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes.

Some of the fanboy outrage evident in the audience reviews is an inevitable consequence of writer/director Rian Johnson trying to do something different and not simply re-writing, or re-booting, The Empire Strikes Back.

As such, it stands in stark contrast to The Force Awakens, the first instalment of the new trilogy, that was overseen by JJ Abrams, and wasn’t far from being a retread of A New Hope with Daisy Ridley’s Rey serving as a female Luke Skywalker.

But this goes beyond the self-appointed keepers of the flame getting their blood in a bubble because of the writer trying to move the story on in ways they object to, as becomes clear from a cursory reading of the responses uploaded to the website.

Here’s a selection:

“Social and political messages invade this story and detract from the flow of the movie.”

“This is why America is failing.”

“Liberal social/political propaganda.”

“The side story with Finn and the diversity hire was just so Disney and not Star Wars.”

There, with that last one, you have someone coming close to being honest about exactly what they don’t like about the movie.

Bad enough that it has a prominent black character in it, and the fact that The Last Jedi basically belongs to Rey, a woman. But now there’s a new cast member who’s a Vietnamese-American (Kelly Marie Tran who plays Rose Tico) too. Enough already!

What happened to the good old days when it was about white blokes, the token woman donned a bikini to give us all a thrill and the token black guy didn’t appear until the second movie and knew his place by remaining in a minor role?

No wonder people are throwing their toys out of their prams and pledging to boycott future films.

The irony in Ukippers and Trumpkins getting all flustered about PC narratives in a film about a battle against space fascists is precious.

I mean, this is a franchise that has featured a green character (Yoda), a furry character (Chewbacca) and a varied assortment of aliens, and yet the straw that’s broken the camel’s back for these people, the thing that really seems to scare them, is the introduction of an Asian-American woman.

Wake up and smell the coffee. Star Wars is a global franchise. The production costs ran to $200m (£150m), and while the rule of thumb is that you double it to include the marketing and ancillary spending to get the total outlay, I’d imagine that that went even higher with this particular film.

If you’re going to spend the thick end of a half a billion dollars on a picture, you’re going to need a global audience.

Modern global audiences quite like a bit of diversity because the globe is quite a diverse place. Who knew?

It’s long past time that Star Wars, as the big budget movie franchise granddaddy, recognised that and the fact that it has is a thoroughly good thing not just in general, but in business terms too. It means that the movie will make enough money to secure lots more diverse Star Wars flicks. More enlightened fanboys – and I am a confirmed fanboy – will be delighted.

It’s actually high time Hollywood recognised this more generally.

The right may like to portray Tinseltown as a hot bed of liberalism (the recent sexual harassment scandals mean that analysis is fraying) but its output speaks otherwise.

We are still waiting for the first Marvel movie fronted by a woman (it’s also Disney-owned). There were more than 20 superhero flicks released, if you add in DC’s output, before the latter took the plunge. Wonder Woman was a critical and commercial hit but it looks like we’re going to have to wait a while to see a second costumed woman fighting bad guys.

Marvel will only release the first solo superhero flick with a non-white lead next year.

The Oscars regularly, and justifiably, get criticised for ignoring African-American actors, writers, composers, directors and producers. It took until 2009 for a woman to win a golden statuette for Best Director and Kathryn Bigelow still stands alone. I could go on.

The fact is, the diversity train is only just getting rolling in Hollywood. If you can’t stomach that, than I suggest you stay home and watch the first three movies on DVD.

OK, I admit to doing that a lot. It’s Star Wars!

As it turns out, the majority of us are a lot more comfortable with what’s happening than the trolls would have you believe. Just look at The Last Jedi’s box office performance or the more scientific polls of audience response than the reviews on Rotten Tomatoes. The film bagged the franchise’s third straight A from Cinemascore, for example.

If you’re one of the creatures who can’t stomach the way this is going you’re on the dark side of the force and you’re about to get a light sabre applied to a painful place. I suggest you close the door on your way out of the multiplex before that happens.

My 10-year-old, seeing all the films with a fresh set of eyes, and experiencing the thrill I did when the first trilogy came out, opined that he thought the new ones were better precisely because of the diversity.

He goes to one of those multi-ethnic, multi-national London schools that the Daily Mail hates, and found the conspicuous absence of non-white characters in the early outings puzzling.

There you have it: A New Hope. Did I mention that his name is Luke?

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