Today Star Wars: The Last Jedi opens and the world has something more than it probably realizes. There's no over-estimating the influence the original trilogy had on my formative years and I'm pleased as hell to be going to see new and good chapters as they're added (man, did I dig Rogue One - a lot better than The Force Awakens for my money), but what the world probably doesn't realize it has today - a much more finite resource has just been spent - a new Rian Johnson movie. The dude who gave us Looper and Brick (and yeah, The Brothers Bloom) has spent years of his creative juice on this flick, as well as a rumored entire spin-off trilogy and that's... a little frightening.
While I'm hoping and guessing it means we get an extra-good Star Wars entry, I'm afraid that we get one less uniquely Johnson-esque picture or three or more in the future.
I enjoy a lot of the big franchise pictures, but man when I ask myself which I'd rather have happen - a Brett Ratner Star Wars and a Rian Johnson original or the other way around - sheeeeit, I'll take it the other way please.
It's happened before... I mean George Lucas did me a huge solid with creating the thing in the first place, but when I look back at his filmography and ask myself would I rather have had him spend decades on tinkering with special editions of the trilogy and the prequel trilogy or maybe work on another THX-1138 or even American Graffiti... it's no contest.
And now there's talk (maybe it's a joke... it's a joke, right?) about Quentin Tarantino doing a Star Trek movie, and Martin Scorsese making a Joker origin picture for the DCU? Things that as a franchise fan might sound fun at first quickly turn to nervous chuckles when you consider the pace of their output and their mortality.
I mean, did we dodge a bullet with David Lynch not doing Return of the Jedi (something I'd actually love to have seen - as much as I enjoy Dune I'd love to have seen his Jabba the Hutt sequence)? Or Darren Aronofsky's Batman? Edgar Wright's Ant Man?
I do think James Gunn's Guardians of the Galaxy is possibly his best work as well as something special and personalized injected into the MCU and Taika Waititi's Thor: Ragnarok sounds like it may be as well, but I hope these are launchpads for funding of their future projects rather than their permanent residence for the next decade.
I was hoping Sam Raimi's turn doing Spider-Man was going to infuse a huge franchise with a weird sensibility, but... not so much. I do think it worked for Tim Burton's Batman and especially Batman Returns, which incidentally is one of my favorite Christmas movies.
Anyway, happy happy, everybody.
We'll always have Looper.
Friday, December 15, 2017
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment