Star Wars 8 starts out rather well…with chocolate from Jacques Genin. He’s making mini-candy bars now. They’re tiny, 2 bullets 40 each (just found out the slang for euros is ‘balles’ gonna overuse the hell ouf of it) and I had three: pistachio paste, raspberry caramel and almond praline. They are criminal.

Star Wars 8 continues not as well, how could it, but not too terribly, with three wildly unmatched trailers: Fifty Shades Freed, Belle & Sebastian 3 and Avengers: Infinity War. So I was aroused, I cried, then averted my eyes so I wouldn’t learn anything. You know, like…uh… Damn, such a great set-up, can’t seem to make a joke there. Get it together, Scott!

What I can say is that Star Wars 8 is appropriate for porn, films about doggies and superheroes. The film for everyone. And therefore, not for me.

I was surprised how much I hated Star Wars 8, or rather, how objectively terrible it was and how subjectively I could then go on to hate it. After a year of many unnoticed serviceable films like Kingsman: Golden Circle and Great Wall, why should this terrible film be positively compared to the comically (literally!) superior and unjustly hated Justice League? Star Wars 7 had made me re-evaluate The Episodes. Star Wars 8 made me re-evaluate a Mr. JJ Abrams film.

A JJ ABRAMS FILM!!!!!

7 was bland, and a copy at best, but it did have a lot of moving parts. 8 is instead a lot of talking, for the reason that it really that it out Abrams the Abrams: it is all about the twists. Since the film takes such delight in its reveals, however inane, I will take equal delight in mine, however âne.

‘Âne’ is french for donkey. For ass.

At the ass end of the Lost Hydra (I guess hydras have tails), 8 seems to know that we’ve anticipated all its possibilities so it must construct its surprises in rather elaborate ways. Example: an hour in, we get to the first act: they have to get a codebreaker to save them from empire being able to track them through hyperspace, even though they have to do this by taking another ship through hyperspace, which entails even more exposition. You’d be mad at me giving away something, but you’ve already fallen asleep.

Anyway, the twist is that this plan, after much running around, doesn’t work, that all the stuff that happened in the second act doesn’t affect the story or characters. Maybe they were trying to surprise their writing teacher.

Turns out, because there’s gonna another twist, that there was another plan to go to a planet. There’s no reason not to tell everybody this, as it would prevent various mutinies, but they don’t, because they have to teach someone a lesson about obeying or rebelling against authority. They get to the planet which turns out to doom them anyway. But they’re saved by Mr. Mark Hamill showing up and dying. But he isn’t really there, but it turns out that but not being there, he dies.

I’m making it sound terrible, and much better than it is. And I’m leaving a lot of stuff out. In order to do this stuff to surprise us, there is a lot of talking. The talking is augmented by junk of the motivational Battleship/Spiderman variety; I don’t want to help and now I do. I have a lesson to learn and I learned it.

Doesn’t even have the name of the theater on it. But it was fun to see it with other people?

Obviously the desire for lots of surprises ruins any chance of having comprehensible characters, but, like 7, they’re barely there as it is. The motives are universally of a you’re not my father, or you didn’t have one, or now you do, or you’re too much a rebel, and you have to learn something about authority variety, and simply fail to connect.

A simple and very odd example. Sacrifice is a simple in to a character, even if that character dies. You sacrifice something for your buddies in combat, we feel something. American films are increasingly disinterested in the concept of sacrifice, (the I Robot Rule), and that’s fine, but this one just feels schizophrenic. Case in point, Ms. Kelly Marie Tran sacrifices herself to save Mr. John Boyega who was going to sacrifice himself for everybody else. I think it was to show him that sacrificing yourself for others is bad. You know, by sacrificing yourself.

I don’t even know what happened, and it would take too long to explain if I did. So, sacrificing yourself for others…good? Bad? Obeying authority? Good? Bad? Good. You’re fighting the Empire, now obey your masters!

But this is reading too much into it really. There’s no ideology here, it’s just a film that sees each scene as a chance to surprise the audience. Deus ex surprisus is easy and works, the way in which crying on cue demonstrates that you can act (*cough* – *cough* no one uses ‘cough’ anymore, Scott – Ms. Daisy Ridley – no one uses ‘*cough*’ anymore, Scott *cough* – *cough*).

In the end, the film feels an amalgam of notes from every code line of the twist-bot 8000, leaving us with a halfhearted sense of commitment in the making of. Like fast-motion Brexit, no one wants to be there, but we got this script in our hands, so what choice do we have? In the middle, I wrote down the parts missing: compelling characters, relatable motivations, story, comprehensible mechanics, etc. This is all true. But ultimately, it’s just a fucking bore. If it took that long for me to explain what the surprises were, imagine watching it.

The worst part for me are the ‘jokes’, which in the face of this hyper-seriousness, makes the experience even more depressing and unfunny. It’s like a uncle molesting you making a joke about being aroused, crying and averting his eyes.

Hey. I did it!