Raunchy Star Wars Tribute Film Reveals Every Problem With The Disney Era
By Chris Snellgrove | Published
There’s nothing like going back to a guilty pleasure movie; it’s the cinematic equivalent of raiding the fridge at 2:00 in the morning and making a sandwich so unhealthy it would give Scooby and Shaggy diabetes. Of course, you he can watch something more enriching, like you can eat something other than meat covered in all the sauces and sugar you own, but where’s the fun in that? Sometimes, the heart wants what the heart wants, even if that’s (let’s face it) cinematic junk food.
Lately, I’ve gone back to some of my guilty pleasure foods: Boysa film about Star Wars scholars trying to figure it out The Phantom Menace before its release. With a 33 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes, it’s fair to say that a lot of people consider this movie to stink. But I’ve always enjoyed how the movie weaves its premise and characters together, successfully leaning into the charms that made us love Luke, Leia, and Han in the first place. Watching Boys now also reveals the biggest problem in Disney’s Star Wars era: the in despair the need to make a dorky franchise seem cool.
Get In The Trash, Fanboy!
Most of Boys homage to the Original Trilogy, which makes sense: for this ’90s-set film, prequels are still to come. Of course, Boys came out in 2009, four years after the Prequel Trilogy ended. The creators knew very well how much fans hated George Lucas’ follow-up movie, so they stopped Boys with a slightly cheeky meta-commentary. As our cast settled in to watch The Phantom Menace On the big screen, one of them makes an unthinkable proposition just before the credits roll: “What if the movie doesn’t like you?”
This line strikes a different note now that Disney has released its own Sequel Trilogy of Star Wars movies. After that film’s failure, there was a lot of critical re-examination of the prequels. Some of this comes from younger viewers who grew up with those movies and have a deep love for the schlock foundation of their childhood. But a surprising number of re-evaluations come from older fans who once reviled the films The Phantom Menace. Those fans decided that, in retrospect, enthusiastic Star Wars films from an honest weirdo are better than unenthusiastic Star Wars films made by a soulless company.
Force Choke the Critics
As one of those old fans, I kept thinking about this comparison when I watched it Boys. To be clear, this is a film full of flaws: the jokes are broad, and many of the thrills (added at Harvey Weinstein’s request, no less) are more sinister than engaging. However, most bad comics are written from the point of view of the titular fanboys, and together they manage to do something I thought was impossible. Namely, the movie comics captured what it was like to be a Star Wars fan in the ’90s.
The characters argue about whether Boba Fett was really a good person, get advice from Harry Knowles, hit on women, and generally act like a bunch of homeschooled kids whose only teacher was a VCR. Some comedies are even worse movies on the edges (seriously, Kristen Bell plays circles around her co-stars), but that’s part of the charm: like the best bad B-movies, these all came from creators who have a deep passion and have something to say. In this way, they effectively channel the quirky excesses of George Lucas himself when he made the soon-to-be-hated prequels.
The Nostalgia Menace
In The Phantom Menacedoes it really make sense for Qui-Gon Jinn to trust his life to an idiot with a speech impediment? It’s not, just as it doesn’t make sense for him to risk the fate of an entire planet on a child slave who ends up buying it and bringing it back to the Jedi temple. The madman continued with it Attack of the Cloneswhich led Obi-Wan Kenobi to solve the galaxy’s greatest conspiracy by talking to the strange owner of his favorite dish. In Sithi’s Revengeon the other hand, Anakin kills adventure kids because he got an “IOU” from saving Padme from a resting monster-faced boss.
All these all of them creative decisions by George Lucas, but that’s part of what makes the prequels special. A man is always swinging for the fence, and even if the bat doesn’t connect, it’s fun to watch each swing. You can’t always really predict where Lucas will go with this story, just like you can never predict what will happen next to the titular characters Boys. There’s a certain magic to that, and watching this fannish comedy unfold has a strangely endearing quality like listening to your craziest friend tell his own story.
IE-Girl and Her Podracer Boyfriend
Compared to the prequels, Disney’s Star Wars sequels are depressingly low. You can to hear business intervention at every step, from conversion The Force Awakens in a soft reboot to bring back Palpatine for nostalgia value. There is no real creative vision behind these movies because the company doesn’t have one to take care of about creativity: they only care about keeping fans happy enough to keep buying endless Funko slop. Lucas may have gotten rich selling toys, but he didn’t care at all that more about fandom; instead, he infused his prequels with anything and everything he found interesting, giving us a trilogy truly unlike any other ever made.
While Boys makes mild fun of the prequels, it has something important in common with those films: it’s packed all of them a crazy idea that creators can get into. Great cameos from heavyweights like William Shatner and Carrie Fisher are present alongside scenes where our heroes learn life lessons from hooks. This film has some serious things to say about life and death, but it also has time to make our heroes strip down to impress the local gays (their very own Mos Eisley). The whole thing is a surprisingly complex meditation on friendship, although this might be hard to see when, say, Kristin Bell is dressed as slave Leia.
Like the beginning of Star Wars, Boys It’s deeply flawed and divisive, but it’s made with honesty and love from the original creative geniuses. That alone gives the film more rewatches than the Disney-era Sequel Trilogy. If you would just like to see How funniest fan comics can be, or maybe you just want to reminisce about the glory days of ’90s Star Wars fandom, you’re in luck. Boys currently streaming on Tubi, which should seriously consider making a new slogan based on everyone’s favorite galaxy, far, far away: “freedom will be with you. Always.”
