Frozen II, Star Wars, and Why the Future of the Film Industry Concerns Me a Little

I recently saw Frozen II and The Rise of Skywalker. I think these movies are similar for many reasons; They’re both sequels to successful interesting films from a few years back, they’re both huge messes that are barely coherent as stories, and they both appear to be unwilling to take any significant narrative risks. I want to briefly talk about the failures of both movies, because I think they reveal some troubling tendencies present in what is swiftly becoming one of the only production companies around.

Consequences in Frozen 2

During the climax of Frozen 2 Anna and Elsa learn that their Grandfather built a dam not as a way to help the indigenous people, but as a way to weaken their land and make them subservient to his colonizing nation. Elsa dies gaining this knowledge, which also kills Olaf who has been talking about the impermanence of life all film long. Anna decides that she has to destroy the dam in order to make things right, even though doing so will destroy her home city of Arendelle. She does it and water rushes towards Arrendelle, a city which has been abandoned anyway, only to be saved last minute by a resurrected Elsa who then brings back Olaf as well. The message being, I guess, that colonialism has no lasting consequences and making up for the sins of the past will require no sacrifice from anyone.

                You may be thinking at this point, “Christian, did you really think they’d kill half the main cast in a kids movie?” I did not, but it was also not me who decided on the main themes of that movie, Frozen 2 is a movie largely about the inevitability of death, and the certainty that to make things right we need to be willing to make sacrifices. The movie thoroughly set up that Arendelle was a city built upon atrocities and in order to make reparations it must fall, and then at the last minute someone decided that that was a scary message and had Elsa right up to the city on a horse and save it. This was not a moment of triumph for me as a viewer, but rather one of great disappointment at the movie’s inability to follow through on its own ideas and themes. Frozen 2 is a movie with no ideology, no beliefs, or at least no backbone. 

                And that’s frustrating because only two years ago Disney released another movie with very similar themes that did follow them through to their conclusion; I am of course talking about Thor Ragnarok; Like Elsa and Anna, Thor learns that his home was built on the back of colonialism and like them he learns that in order to set things right his home needs to be destroyed. But unlike Frozen II, he follows through and in the end Asgard explodes into little pieces. Its one thing for a company to slowly become more cowardly over time, it’s another when that apparently takes 2 years to happen.

The Failure of The Rise of Skywalker

                The Rise of Skywalker is the most disappointing movie in the Star Wars franchise. I understand why someone might argue that that is The Phantom Menace, but at least that movie felt like it was made for a reason with a coherent ideology. Skywalker plays like a movie made by focus groups in order to please as many people as possible. The Rise of Skywalker is a movie that tried to indicate its lack of backbone in the trailer, and very quickly establishes it in its own title crawl. Now, Skywalker has a lot of problems besides cowardice, it’s a completely incoherent film for one, but I’m not particularly interested in talking about its failure to be a coherent story, even though ultimately that was my biggest problem with it. Instead I want to talk about all the ways it refuses to do anything in the least bit interesting.

Rey From Nowhere and the Democratization of the Force

              

                The final scene in The Last Jedi showed a young slave boy pick up a broom with the force casually as he stared up at the night sky. This worked to accentuate a theme the movie had demonstrated by revealing that Rey’s parents were not royalty or Jedi but rather nobodies who sold her for drinking money. This revelation helps to demonstrate that the force doesn’t just belong to the rich and powerful, but rather to anyone. Rey and the boy both come from nobody and nowhere but they matter just as much as someone who comes from noble blood.

                Skywalker reveals that this isn’t true so early on that I almost don’t consider it a spoiler; Rey is in fact the granddaughter of Sheev Palpatine, and her parents were brave and noble people who “sold her to protect her.” After this Rey’s power and importance are always presented as the result of her bloodline. Kylo Ren and Rey both matter because they are powerful people descended from powerful bloodlines. This could have been somewhat okay if the filmmakers had decided to show force users from many backgrounds show up, except they don’t. The closest we get is a suggestion that Finn may be force sensitive, except that ultimately the movie seemingly forgot about Finn and his storyline entirely. At the end of the movie Rey has the opportunity to at least reject her royal bloodline, which she does but then takes the name Skywalker suggesting names and titles are still important to her and to Star Wars.

Snoke and Palpatine

                During a key scene in The Last Jedi Kylo Ren slices Supreme Leader Snoke in half and takes his title. This excited me because Snoke was in fact really boring as both a character and a villain. By killing him we are able to focus on the interesting villain in this franchise, Kylo Ren, and we are given an opportunity to have a third movie that does not directly resemble the first two. In the opening title crawl of Skywalker we are informed that Palpatine is back from the dead. Shortly afterwards we learn that he somehow has a fleet of star destroyers that he was saving in the sand which are crewed by… ghosts maybe? Sure. Which are crewed by ghosts. He then instructs Kylo to bring Rey to him so he can kill her, but secretly he wants to turn her to the dark side. Disney had the opportunity to have a Star Wars movie that was unpredictable and unique, and instead decided to make Return of the Jedi but dumber.

Repairing Broken Things

                In The Last Jedi Kylo smashed his mask into little pieces, and then Rey and Kylo break Luke’s lightsabre in half. Skywalker just allows us to assume that Leia fixed the lightsabre offscreen and shows us Kylo fixing his mask.

                          

                I think this one is unintentionally hilarious; these things are destroyed in Last Jedi in order to show us both the consequences of violence and anger, but also to allow a new future for the franchise. We see in Kylo smashing his mask a metaphorical smashing of the imitation of the aesthetic of earlier Star Wars movies, so by fixing it Skywalker is declaring its intent of never doing anything new or different.

Making its Own Mistakes

                Skywalker doesn’t just retcon away all the most interesting things from The Last Jedi, it also undoes everything interesting it attempts to do. Rey unwittingly murdering Chewbacca is undone in the next scene, C3PO’s memory wipe is undone about 20 minutes later, and Hux is killed the moment we learn he’s the mole and then never mentioned again. Rey almost kills both Chewie and BB8, and feels guilty during the scene itself, but will be back to her old self by the next scene. Kylo has little to no dialogue after his conversion back to the light side. Rey dies only to be immediately brought back to life, only for Kylo to then die leaving us with Rey alive and Kylo dead after briefly teasing us with a more interesting ending. This is a movie that doesn’t only lack the strength of the previous film’s convictions; but doesn’t have the strength to follow through on any of its own.

                             

Other Problems

                There are so many other things I could talk about. The pacing and plot of the film feel so inconsistent that at times I wondered if it had been pieced together from several other cuts. The final act is incredibly dumb and misses several opportunities to have any kind of thematic resonance. There are other things that bother me such as how Finn’s role has been reduced to mostly yelling Rey’s name a lot, or how the film has pretty much completely cut Rose Tico out entirely. It’s an incredibly flawed film and I really don’t feel even vaguely up to the task of pointing out all the ways it failed.

Mass Effect 3, How I Met Your Mother and Controversy in Media

                In 2012 Bioware released the video game Mass Effect 3 causing a massive fan backlash from those who didn’t like the ending. The fans demanded a new ending and they soon kind of got one. Bioware made longer more detailed ending videos that addressed some of the complaints without undoing any of the larger ideas or plots they had made. Whether this qualified as too little too late depended largely on who you asked, but ultimately, I was relieved. If people altered endings as soon as fans complained, then endings to stories would become pointless endeavors. They may as well just type Insert Preferred Ending Here. A few years later the sitcom How I met your Mother did just that when they released the “happy” ending on dvd which was edited to be exactly what fans wanted it to be.  I’m not claiming that either ending is particularly great, but in order to make art that speaks to people we have to be willing to take risks and try things that might not work. 

                I don’t have a problem with fans expressing that they didn’t like an ending, although I do think there are good and bad ways to do this. When artists are forced to capitulate to fan demand and media is made to please the loudest, most irritating parts of the fanbase it does not lead to compelling narratives. It’s fine for people not to like The Last Jedi. My problem is when the next movie in the series is majorly altered to please those fans to the point where it barely works as a film, not to mention as a conclusion.  

                Some argue that that is not what happened here, and that Disney is smart enough to recognize that the fans who hated Last Jedi were a loud minority. I would think that if that were true then they would be smart enough not to release Rise of Skywalker in the first place. Disney doesn’t want to make art; they want to make something that appeals to everyone so that they can make all the money in the world.

Why all this Matters

                When I left Frozen II I said “Disney, if you are going to make all the movies, could you at least try to make good ones?” Of the top 20 highest grossing movies of all time 14 of them are owned by Disney. At this point Disney is actively trying to beat its own records. And they are only interested in making more and more money. The film industry is becoming increasingly monopolized under Disney, and now we can see that rather than leading to Disney realizing that they can’t fail and taking more risks this is leading to Disney getting safer and safer and making more “crowd pleasing” remakes.

The Rise of Skywalker feels like a film in which a committee went through a reddit post and tried to address every complaint they saw; as a narrative it is a mess of ideas sewn together, and as a film it often feels like a list of plot elements and not an actual movie. Solo had a similar problem, as did Rogue One. Frozen II on the other hand felt like a much braver screenplay that scared a committee who then forced the ending to be more “crowd pleasing”. 

                When I watch Frozen II and The Rise of Skywalker I do not get frustrated just because I watched a couple bad movies; I get frustrated because I’m worried that what I’m watching is the future of the film industry.