So, the Rise of Skywalker has hit. I haven't seen it yet, we're planning on going Christmas night. I have been keeping up with leaks and spoilers though, and have been reading the reviews. Suffice it to say, from my limited understanding, if you were to go by all the reviews it's both a great movie and a terrible movie, depending on whose review you read (or watch on YouTube). What's really interesting for my purposes here, is that it's not the quality of the movie, the writing, or the visuals which the negative reviewers take issue with. It's that their expectations concerning storylines and relationships were not met. They took serious, and in some cases viciously rabid issue, when things didn't go the way they thought they should have. This was most frequently the case with, dare I say it, "devout", hard core Star Wars fans.
This isn't the first time a Star Wars movie has been panned by the fans. The Last Jedi also divided the fan base because of its seemingly "heretical" portrayals of Luke Skywalker in particular. But even before this, the Star Wars prequels drew fans ire as well.
What's really interesting about the prequel "fan hate" is that those were done by George Lucas, the creator and "auteur" of Star Wars himself. To this day, some twenty years later, there are fans that will refuse to admit the prequels as canon, regardless of George Lucas' direct involvement. Why? Because they did not adhere to the backstory which the fans thought was supposed to have happened.
The Disney Star Wars films, except for Rian Johnson's Last Jedi, have bent over backwards trying to cater to the fan base. But the fan base isn't one homogenous group. It's made up of individuals with their own "head canons" who have already determined what Star Wars is, and isn't, regardless of the actual creator's or writer's intents and results. It is very true that you cannot please all of the fans, because the fans themselves do not agree with one another, and have separated themselves into "denominations" of Star Wars fans. Some accepting all 9 movies, some accepting only the original trilogy, some accepting only the original and prequels, some damning the Last Jedi, and some praising it and accepting all 9 movies, Rogue One, Solo, the Clone Wars, and now the Mandalorian as completely canon. As several people have observed, Star Wars, in the last 42 years, has become a kind of secular religion and its adherents have become just as opinionated and divided as the rest of the world's major religions.
While Disney tried to cater to the fan base, what's interesting is that George Lucas never did. He locked down his shooting and sets so much that no one knew anything about the movies before they hit the theaters (granted, this was before the advent of drones and modern cell phone tech). The fans just had to wait and see what the creator delivered to them, and accept it or reject it as they would. And while George Lucas wanted people to enjoy his vision, their opinions didn't change the direction of the story he wanted to tell, or that he always wanted the Star Wars story to be one that kids could see and understand and enjoy (another point of contention among Star Wars fans, that it's targeted at kids).
God's a lot like George in this respect. He knows exactly the story He's telling and how He wants it told, and isn't going to change it to please the fan base, "any" fan base. I was reflecting on this similarity this morning because just like the Star Wars fans, religion in general, "God fans," and Christianity in particular, "Jesus fans" if you will, are divided among people who have viciously savage opinions about what the story is supposed to look like, and how it is supposed to go. Frequently, they look at the existing canon, and decide they don't like what was said and so totally ignore it, or decide it's not actually canon at all. At the other end of the spectrum, they continue to expand on it trying to please their own section of fan base and give them what they want, but end up angering other fans in the process. This was true with the God fans in the first century when God released His sequel to "The Prophets", "The Messiah," and it is true now as we're waiting for the impending finale, "The Apocalypse."
No matter how much we speculate, no matter how much we complain when we hear or see "leaks" that don't match the way we think it's supposed to go, God isn't going to change how He's going to unfold and wrap up the story. Denial isn't going to help, neither is trying to force events to occur to match what you think is supposed to happen (the religious equivalent of fan filming). When the auteur is done with it, He'll release it and He's not going to change it or tweak it because you don't agree. You can either accept what's happening, or you can reject it. But if you reject it, maybe you should really consider whether or not you're really a fan of Him at all, or a fan of your own fan fiction.
May the Force be with you this Star Wars movie... er, Christmas season!
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