Like Master Yoda reminds us in The Last Jedi, "The greatest teacher, failure is.James moans a lot but even when you hear him grunt you know he’s got another idea that will change his mind. Will fans learn from their reaction to The Last Jedi as they watch their favorite heroes from The Avengers get pulled apart? I hope so. That's what the entire hero's journey is about. And it's going to be brutal to see it play out onscreen.īut the surviving heroes, at least in the comics, learn from those failures, and eventually overcome them. In fact, in the comics, Thanos kills pretty much the entire Marvel Universe of heroes. If you've read the comics the film is loosely inspired by, you know that things don't go well for our heroes. It's the first part of a two-part story involving what looks to be the end of the Avengers as we currently know them. Would Frodo have gotten the ring to Mount Doom had the fellowship not broken? Would Bruce Wayne have become Batman without the guilt of failing to save his parents? Would Harry Potter have defeated Voldemort had he not learned the lessons from Cedric Diggory's death? It's doubtful any of those heroes would have succeeded without what appeared at the time to be failures.Īll of this has me worried about how audiences might react to the impending release of Avengers: Infinity War. We needed to see their failures in order to pave way for future success, and their eventual victory will be all the sweeter. The Last Jedi might not have given us the heroes we wanted, but I'll be damned if they weren't the heroes we needed. And they certainly didn't like watching the Resistance get torn to pieces. They didn't like watching Rey fail so hard that she inadvertently helped Ben Solo/Kylo Ren become the unhinged leader of the First Order. They didn't like seeing Poe Dameron make bad decisions. This group didn't like not seeing the happily ever after they expected. Director Rian Johnson even received death threats. And a small, vocal band of fans revolted. In that film, Luke Skywalker sacrifices himself to save a handful of Resistance fighters, few enough by this point that the entirety of that rebellion can fit aboard the Millennium Falcon. The same pattern is repeated in 2017's yet-to-be-resolved The Last Jedi. As a result, that "unsatisfying" middle chapter cemented its reputation as, arguably, the best of the Star Wars films. When Return of the Jedi came out, we saw the resolution of Empire. In the moment, Empire seemed unsatisfying-it's a film without a neat and tidy ending. "How in the world are they going to get out of this one?" we're left asking. How would the reaction to the bleak ending of The Empire Strikes Back play out today? Our heroes are scattered to the wind: Han Solo is trapped in carbonite, Luke is a mess who has lost his hand and found out who his father is. The cliffhangers that used to keep us questioning now feel like flaws or mistakes to many fans. Sometimes, however, fandom can rebel, especially in an age of instant gratification. Joseph Campbell's hero's journey revolves around that cycle of failure and learning, and it's embedded in almost all of geekdom's great storytelling, designed to show us hope through the darkest parts of our journeys. This is the central conceit in heroic narratives. His answer? "So that we can learn to pick ourselves up." "Why do we fall?" Thomas Wayne rhetorically asks his son in Batman Begins.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |