A few quick disclaimers before we begin.
- This will NOT be a trash fest. I’m not here to bash on any movie or anybody.
- This will, ultimately, be about Star Wars – I promise.
Okay, now to the matters at hand…
“What do they got in there? King Kong?” That is still one of my favorite movie lines of all time.
I distinctly remember being 4 years old and hiding behind the couch. Jurassic Park was my favorite movie as a kid. By kid I mean when you were watching The Lion King– well I was also watching The Lion King. But only when I wasn’t watching Jurassic Park. See, I was allowed to watch it only until it started to rain (in the movie of course.) Because that’s when the movie got scary. That’s when I was told to turn it off. Did I turn it off like I was supposed to? lol ur cute
I left it running like any kid would and I got terrified like any kid would. But I kept watching. Why? It wasn’t rebellion. I wasn’t trying to break any rules. I just loved the movie so much even as it sent me running. (And for the record I LOVE all three of the original films and I do not want to hear about whatever you didn’t like about JPIII because you cray cray.)
I just loved dinosaurs as a kid. Who didn’t? I had toys that had migrations across the yard at least once a day. They all had names and stories and families. The Land Before Time series was my jam and boy when Chomper came back for LBT V: The Mysterious Island you KNOW I was excited.
When most kids wanted to be a doctor or a firefighter or the President, I wanted to be a paleontologist. Specifically, I wanted to be Dr Grant. He was just the coolest. He was my Batman. He was my Superman. He was what I wanted to be. And for the next 10 years that’s what I was going to do. Never once did I change my mind. Never once did I waver. I was going to be a paleontologist. The summer between my freshman and sophomore year of high school I actually got to go on a dinosaur dig. There is a small museum near Chicago that funds its digs in the Hell Creek formation in Montana by having non-science people join them. It’s called “Highway to Hell Creek” amusingly enough. It was a blast! I walked around in the middle of no where. No cell service. No Internet. You peed in tumbleweeds. You checked the tumbleweeds for rattlesnakes before you peed in them. It was the time of my life! I could have signed up for more than the week I was there for… until I realized all of the paleontologists were having as much fun as I was. This was a vacation for them too. I would later find out they spent most of their time writing grants and research papers. That shook the unshakable. Going to school for a PhD to make no money and write papers all day. Hard pass from YodaBauer.
So 14-year-old me didn’t really know what to do. It was around this time I got into Making-Ofs on DVDs and I got into how Jurassic Park was made. And that I found really interesting indeed! And I began to fall in love with the magic of movie making. After all, it was something that gave me focus for 10 years of my life. It was also around this time that I became an all out Star Wars fanatic. I was always a fan. I always loved the movies. But it was the summer before I went adventuring (cue “I Want to Go Adventuring” from LBT X: The Great Longneck Migration) that Revenge of the Sith came to theaters. And that hype was everything. It was my first midnight show. I talked about it for months. I kept a picture of Anakin and Obi-Wan facing off in my pocket so I could look at it and get hyped. (It was from an ELFudge package.) A theater manager let me into The Incredibles just so I could see the RotS trailer (provided I didn’t stay for the movie for free.) See, I went to the theaters JUST to see the trailer but went to the wrong movie and the guy did me a solid. As one love was starting to fade, a new one was just beginning. After RotS I started into the EU with Shatterpoint and Knights of the Old Republic.
Then I went to college. Not for science-y things but for video production. I had started making my own weird movies on old school iMovie HD. And I was all about it. I wasn’t just making anything. I was experimenting. Learning in camera edit tricks and cheesy filters and any way I could to try and tell stories.
And boy did I like telling stories. In hindsight it made sense. All of my dinosaurs had a story. All of my Beanie Babies had a story (#90sKid). I used to write stories about vegetables (a conspiracy by my mother to get me to like vegetables. It didn’t work). So I went to school and I wanted to tell more stories. I wanted to spark adventure in people the way Jurassic Park had done for me. I wanted to inspire people, as corny and millennial as that sounds. And Star Wars became the perfect fuel for that fire. But my Star Wars fandom is all over this site. What of Jurassic Park?
Well in 2015 a little movie called Jurassic World came out. I was excited. I had been following Jurassic Park 4 and its on again off again production for a while. I was wary though. A movie that was in film limbo for so long might not turn out well. But well it did nonetheless. It broke records. The world fell in love. Everyone loved it. I though it was a’ight, I guess.
I mean, when I saw it for the first time I was super into it. My fangirl heart racing as I watched a a raptor and a T-Rex fight a sithspawn of a dinosaur. All of the fan feelings were swirling. Then I watched it again and… well. Yeah. It’s a movie. It just didn’t do it for me. I haven’t really watched it since. I don’t really want to. I haven’t seen Fallen Kingdom. I don’t really want to.
Now, I’m not going to go on a rant about why I didn’t like it. To be honest I haven’t seen it in 3 years and I don’t really remember why I didn’t. And if you’re a fan you probably don’t want to hear it anyway. I’m not here you rain on anyone’s parade. If you like the JW franchise- more power to you. I hope they continue to come out and you continue to love them and they’re everything you ever wanted. Truly. I’m just not going to watch them. It isn’t a protest- it’s a lack of interest.
But I said I’m not here to dump on a movie and I meant it. I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately in the wake of TLJ. Why don’t I like the JW movies? I’ve come to a realization.
I don’t want to like them. 
Not only am I not interested in the movies, I am not interested in being interested. Is this bad? Does it make me negative? Am I somehow a bad person with latent bigotry that somehow makes me a hurt fangirl with hurt fangirl feelings? No. It doesn’t. I’m not out on Twitter campaigning to remake Jurassic World. I’m not out there making sure you hate it. I just don’t care. I actually don’t care. As in- I am neutral. I won’t refuse to watch it if I’m at a friend’s place. But I’m not going to watch it on my own. There’s a difference.
So why am I not interested? A few reasons probably. The films are tied to a part of my life I moved on from. Not in a bad way. I don’t regret my childhood. My interests, however, are not my childhood interests. There’s nothing wrong with that. Alternatively, there’s nothing wrong with your interests never changing. It’s just want happens. We all go down our own path. Truth is, I found Star Wars (among other things) and it represented where I wanted my life to go from that point. It’s not that I hate JW, it’s that my heart is somewhere else. There’s just not enough time in the day and just not enough energy in my body to love them both with the fervor I would want to. It doesn’t make me negative, it means I made choices and I had to prioritize. Jurassic Park became Jurassic World. Somehow in that process it left me. But I realize now that I also left it.
So what does this have to do with anything? Well maybe, maybe, if you don’t like the sequel trilogy, or the spin offs, or Rebels, or the new books, then perhaps Star Wars didn’t just leave you. Maybe you left it too. And it’s sad. It is sad when things change. But you can’t stop the change anymore than you can stop the suns from setting. But if something just isn’t the same for you maybe it’s because you have changed. And that’s a good thing (probably). We all have to change. We all go through things and don’t come out the same. Hopefully, we change for the better. Sometimes things stay with us and sometimes they don’t.
Maybe one day I’ll leave Star Wars too. I hope not, but always in motion is the future. But really want I want to say is this:
If you didn’t like The Last Jedi that is okay and don’t let anyone tell you differently. If it just didn’t do it for you, that’s fine. If it didn’t strike a cord, okay. BUT if you didn’t like it because you can’t stand to see a female lead or something then you have other issues that are bigger than not liking Star Wars. It might not be that you hate the problems with Star Wars, it is more likely you just have a hate problem.
BUT to that point, guys, please. We can’t lump “haters” into some sort of weird category. I may not feel as many feel about Star Wars but I feel it about something else. And it’s not because I hate women or POCs or GMO dinosaurs or whatever. I can’t even tell you why I don’t like what I don’t like. I just don’t. But when we categorize and throw insults we force people to feel like they have to side with the actual haters. Just because someone doesn’t think Rose or Rey are perfectly written characters doesn’t mean they hate women. Are there people who hate women and blast it on the Internet? Of course. And they have abysmal views that I do not support. But they aren’t everyone. I can’t tell you how many Twitter debates I’ve thrown myself into assuming the worst, only to find out the person on the other side was reasonable. I won’t keep making that mistake or declaring people guilty until proven innocent. We need to be careful that we don’t become what we hate. That we don’t become bullies in fighting bullies.
There is a two-way street to this. If you’re out there enjoying something and minding your own business you don’t deserve to have someone yell at you for liking a thing. If you’re out there NOT enjoying something and minding your own business you don’t deserve to have someone yell at you for not liking a thing. Let’s just let each other be. We all know how we feel about these movies. Let’s stop making Star Wars as taboo as elections and religion, please.
To the reasonable, average viewer who just didn’t like TLJ simply because you didn’t. I don’t agree with you, and I never will. But I understand you. You are who I wrote this article for. You are who is getting passed over online. You are still a fan. And I will talk Star Wars with you any day.
