I think "Star Wars: The Last Jedi" was a bad movie. That is a personal opinion, one with which other men and women of good will should feel comfortable disagreeing.
I also think the people who have been harassing Kelly Marie Tran, John Boyega, Rian Johnson and other creative individuals who helped make "Star Wars: The Last Jedi" are racist, sexist and all-around deplorable human beings (and I use the term "deplorable" quite deliberately here).
Before I get into the problem of the toxic nerd culture that has caused the harassment of "The Last Jedi" alums like actress Tran, however, I'd like to explain precisely why I think the movie itself was an epic misfire. Appropriately enough, the easiest way to explain my point is to compare "The Last Jedi" to the "Breaking Bad" antepenultimate episode "Ozymandias," which, like "The Last Jedi," was directed by Rian Johnson. Without spoiling the story, its purpose was to serve as the climax for all of the major characters viewers had gotten to know throughout the show — the moment when, for everyone from antiheroes Walter White and Jesse Pinkman to their adversary Hank Schrader, the proverbial chickens came home to roost. It was a powerful piece of television filmmaking and — because it was suitably epic while remaining rooted in what viewers had come to know and love (or hate) about the characters — felt like an appropriate culmination of their various story arcs. Frankly, I'd be shocked if it wasn't instrumental in landing Johnson his "Star Wars" gig.
That said, "Star Wars" is not "Breaking Bad," and the same narrative tricks that worked for the latter feel jarringly out of place in the former. (Johnson deserves to be commended for his boldness, but audacity is not the same thing as quality.) The problem with "The Last Jedi" is that it doesn't logically connect everything we saw from the previous movies with what happens in this one. As Mark Hamill himself pointed out, Luke Skywalker's (Hamill) abandonment of his belief in Jedi teachings directly contradicts his personality and actions from the original trilogy, and the backstory filled in here to explain his sudden turn is delivered in startlingly brief monologues instead of scenes that actually flesh out the character dilemmas they're meant to reveal. Because the explanation for Luke's loss of faith is critical to the film's plot, the perfunctory execution makes everything we're supposed to believe about his character's transformation feel unconvincing. While his scenes training Rey (Daisy Ridley) are beautifully done, they can't make up for the fact that the character performing the training feels less like Luke Skywalker than he does Johnson's own original creation with the Skywalker name slapped onto him.
The other storyline isn't much better. In Plot B we see Finn (John Boyega) team up with a maintenance worker named Rose Tico (Tran) to help Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac) circumvent the seemingly incompetent leadership of Vice Admiral Amilyn Holdo (Laura Dern). There are many problems here. First, Rose and Finn wind up abandoning their plan halfway through its execution for the flimsiest of reasons and, even worse, have all of their work rendered entirely moot by a betrayal from someone who it was blazingly obvious should never have been trusted in the first place. This is a shame, if for no other reason than the chemistry between Finn and Rose makes them easily the most likable and sympathetic characters in the film. Poe and Holdo have their charms as well — Poe is endearingly plucky and adventurous while Holdo has a quiet bravery and wisdom to her — but their conflict is marred by the fact that it winds up being pointless. After all the strategic Sturm und Drang between the two of them has subsided, it's hard to see how the Resistance didn't wind up back exactly where it started, despite Poe's and Holdo's various moments of character growth and/or sacrifice. It's much ado that adds up to, if not nothing, at least less than the sum of its parts.
Of course, these are only my assessments. Given the opportunity, I would jump at the chance to have a respectful conversation with Johnson, who I am certain set out to make a wonderful movie, as well as the millions of people who loved "The Last Jedi." That's the thing about a work of art: It is perfectly OK to dislike it, even dislike it intensely (although my emotions toward "The Last Jedi" can be better characterized as "disappointed" than "outraged"). I'm certain that Johnson has movies that he disliked and that the critics who defend "The Last Jedi" also have movies that they disliked, and I hope that they too could disagree with those films' fans without being disagreeable. It's called being civil — as well as remembering that there are issues way, way more important than whether or not a particular movie missed the mark.
This brings us to the problem of toxic nerd culture.
It's one that we've seen pop up before. The watershed moment, as Johnson himself observed in a tweet earlier this week, was the Gamergate scandal of 2014. On that occasion, feminist critics of video games and women in the gaming industry in general were singled out for harassment by thousands of gamers who deplored what they felt was an intrusion into their domain by left-wing "social justice warriors." They were particularly upset about attempts to criticize both games and the gaming industry as sexist, with writer Jenn Frank explaining in The Guardian that "they feel they are at war with a group of left-leaning games writers and developers who they refer to as 'social justice warriors' – this is effectively anyone who has ever questioned the patriarchal nature of the games industry or the limited, often objectifying depiction of women."
Of course, the backlash of pop culture nerd bigotry was hardly limited to Gamergate. When the trailer for "Star Wars: The Force Awakens" revealed that one of the protagonists would be played by the African-British actor John Boyega, it led to a cry of outrage by many "Star Wars" fans. In 2016, there was a comparable outcry against the "Ghostbusters" reboot from the nerd community, with internet fans lashing out against a film they hadn't even seen (or at least hadn't seen prior to vehemently denouncing it) because it had replaced the traditionally all-male Ghostbusters cast with women. One year later, a so-called Comicsgate occurred that seemed to be sparked by a picture of female comics writers at Marvel going out for milkshakes.
And this is just the short list.
It isn't difficult to draw a straight line from Gamergate and Comicsgate and the Ghostbusters backlash to the racist and sexist harassment that Tran experienced and which drove her offline altogether. On each of these occasions, a clear pattern of behavior emerged:
1. Some fans felt outraged that pop culture spaces that they believed should be specifically white, straight and male — whether mediums like video games and comic books or specific franchises like "Star Wars" and "Ghostbusters" — had been compromised by the inclusion of people who weren't.
2. In order to reclaim these spaces for straight white men, they join likeminded people online and attempt to take down these properties by either (a) claiming that their outrage isn't because of racism, sexism or other forms of prejudice but rather because the developments that just so happen to be associated with minorities are "ruining" their medium/franchise of choice or (b) being explicit in the fact that their motivations are racist and sexist, usually by harassing their targets with slurs and threats. Sometimes they also do (a) and (b) at the same time, never mind the fact that (b) pretty much proves the lie in the premise of (a).
3. They act like the injured party when they are criticized for their behavior. This point is absolutely crucial to understand: They do not perceive of themselves as bullies, or as bigots, but rather they pose as aggrieved parties. In the best case scenarios, it is because they claim that something they've loved all of their life has been taken away from them; in the worst case scenarios, it's because they claim that pop culture is being used to attack them as straight white men (just look at the popularity of Jordan Peterson, who has described "Frozen" as "propaganda" because of its subversion of traditionally feminine narrative themes).
Just to be clear: Not all of this toxic nerd entitlement is based in racism or sexism. Sometimes it's simply silly, like the "Suicide Squad" fans who complained about the critics on Rotten Tomatoes giving their beloved film a low score; other times it's more tragic, like George Lucas selling the "Star Wars" franchise to Disney because the fan community's vitriol toward him meant that it wasn't fun for him to make the movies anymore.
At the same time, it is important for us to note that because pop culture has become a secular religion or tangential political battleground in our society, people are going to import the same prejudices that they bring to those other realms into the cultural spheres. To an extent, this is unavoidable, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't work to combat it. Three methods come to mind for doing so effectively:
1. It must be accepted that content creators — whether they are writers, directors, actors, producers, developers or the lowly intern who gets the coffee — have a right to the basic respect afforded all other people. This is an absolutely inviolable principle. If you think a given movie or game or book was sub-par, fine. As a film critic, I'm certainly not going to pull my punches if I think an artist didn't meet my qualitative expectations. But there is a clear and obvious difference between saying that someone's artistic creation was bad and trying to inflict harm on that person for reasons that have nothing to do with their work and everything to do with your prejudices and sense of entitlement. There is never, ever any occasion in which the latter is acceptable.
2. The media needs to cover these issues more thoroughly. As Johnson observed in a different tweet discussing Gamergate, "I think it was covered heavily but in a very niche corner of the media." This seems to be the rule of thumb for all of these controversies, and while a case can be made for not giving trolls a bigger platform, that argument ignores the degree to which sunlight can be the best disinfectant.
3. Nerds, as a rule, need to remember where they came from.
I'm going to close this article on that last point because, as a nerd myself, I remember being scorned as a child for my various obsessions (history, politics, science fiction literature, horror movies). One of the things that gave me comfort was the knowledge that, according to the archetypes that existed throughout media, I was at the very least someone worthy of sympathy — awkward and weird and annoying, to be sure (being autistic doesn't help), but at least respected as not only intelligent, but benign and fundamentally decent and in-touch with that special type of childlike enthusiasm that only the best adults can channel.
That archetype is gone now, or at best dying. When the "Ghostbusters" reboot turned its villain into a sexist nerd stereotype, they weren't doing so to insult their fans (as many online commenters claimed) but to make a point about how a duality has emerged in the nerd community's image. After all, the four new Ghostbusters played by Kristen Wiig, Leslie Jones, Melissa McCarthy and Kate McKinnon were all nerds as well, but they were the ones who stood by their passions in a way that tried to help other people rather than hurt them. That was the nerd archetype of old that the movie was trying to support; the angry, bitter nerd played by Neil Casey was the one that needed to be destroyed.
Considering that I liked the "Ghostbusters" reboot (a verboten view among many nerds), I can't think of a better way to end this piece than by citing its message. Here is to hoping that it's a message other nerds will follow — even if they dislike the "Ghostbusters" movie itself, as they have every right to do.
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