2016: Why Was It So Rubbish?

2016 has been quite a year. For almost everyone with an interest in what goes on in the Western World, some unpredictable things have happened. At the start of the year, most people who professed to know about these things thought that the USA would have its first female president-elect by November. Regardless of what you think about Donald Trump’s amazing route to the White House, the startling fact is that it was not thought possible.

In the UK there was a similarly unsettling political change, with the vote to leave the European Union surprising many and dividing the country in a quite profound way.

The end of a calendar year is a good opportunity to gather around the Prosecco, take a step back, and look at what has happened. When Donald Trump was elected, why were so many people surprised? His name was on the ticket. It was a possible event, and not something that has never happened before. In 1948 the Chicago Daily Tribune event went as far as to print the headline ‘Dewey defeatsTruman’, when the opposite was true.

Likewise for the EU vote – the voting paper said ‘in’ and ‘out’, so one of two results was to be expected. There was a blurring of the lines between what could happen and what many believed ought to happen. The media manipulated the way everyone considered the either / or choice and made many believe that only one result was possible.

These two events have left many people distraught. At the end of the year, it is worth getting a little perspective.

For example, it is not one hundred years ago. We have not just gone through the experience of thousands of lives lost at The Somme, with Ypres just over the horizon.

Nor is it 1816, with Europe still shuddering after the upheaval of Napoleon and the events of Peterloo to come to the poor in short order.

There have been hundreds of individual years in the past thousand that have been significantly worse than 2016. We have to ask ourselves would we rather live through 2016 again, or 1941, or 1945, or 1917, or 1349?

And then Everyone Started To Die. If you take an interest in music, there was much sadness. Bowie, Prince, Leonard Cohen, George Michael and Greg Lake. If you are a film enthusiast, you had to say goodbye to Carrie Fisher, her mother Debbie Reynolds, Zsa Zsa, Gene Wilder and Alan Rickman. Ali died. So did Castro. There were weeks when it seemed like something very odd was happening.

The rather dull truth is that nothing exceptional was happening at all. People die all the time. With seven billion of us on the planet and all of us mortal, it’s going to happen to everyone sooner or later. It happens to 150 000 every day.

What is changing slowly is that we know more of the people who are successful in any given field. We live in a media saturated world, where there is more room for people to be famous. As a result, more people are famous. Additionally, the phenomenon of celebrity or stardom exploded at the start of the 1960s. You can decide for yourself what started the ball rolling; but when it did a whole generation of people like Mohammad Ali, The Beatles, Neil Armstrong and Bobby Moore became super, super famous. And now they are all old, or worse. To be famous in 1966 means you were born either during the Second World War or shortly after it. A whole generation of people who were in this category are now over seventy. To be brutal, what is increasingly likely to happen to these people? They are likely to meet their maker.

So whilst there can be shock or sadness about the passing of a young famous person – and to the best of my knowledge nobody joined the 27 Club this year – should we really be surprised at the loss of Leonard Cohen (aged 82) or Fidel Castro (aged 90)?

So, as 2016 (The Worst Year Ever ©) comes to an end, I will feel regret that I will never see Prince on stage. I will also raise a glass to the memory of Carrie Fisher, who was such a part of my childhood. But instead of feeling maudlin, I will be thanking the Grim Reaper for leaving most of us alone. God Bless Sir David Attenborough (still making amazing television at ninety) and Jimmy Carter (still spreading common sense at ninety-two) and Stephen Hawking (still amazing us all, fifty years after being told his time was up).

It’s time to shake off 2016, celebrate the brilliant people still making this planet a better place, and step forward into 2017 smiling.

Rogue One

An expanding universe

Thoughts on the growth of the Star Wars franchise, and how Disney is getting it right

The trouble with many Star Wars fans is that they love the films too much. In 1999 I fell into that trap when I went to see Episode I, and naively thought that it would be as good as or better than the original trilogy of films (IV – VI).

Instead I realised that George had part-baked a turkey. It was a film aimed at ten year olds. Whilst much of my behaviour in my thirties was akin to a primary school child, I wanted more. I wanted something that appealed to me, and returned me to the magic of my childhood.

How could anybody have pulled off this alchemy for a whole generation? Certainly George Lucas did not. The founder of the dynasty was now someone whose reputation was rather tarnished. It was George’s baby, and he tried too hard, and we got gungans.

The ‘prequel’ trilogy (which, to the uninitiated, filled in the story before the films, and explained why the first one to appear was called ‘Episode IV’) rumbled on, successful at the box office but disappointing the core market of obsessives – the people who had been little boys in the seventies, and wanted to return to that happy place.

The only analogy I can use to describe how I felt is a sporting one. My other obsession in childhood was football, and I had the good fortune to inherit a love of Liverpool FC from my parents. The first Star Wars film came out in 1977, the same year as Liverpool won their first European Cup. Star Wars films followed in 1980 and 1983, and European Cups followed in 1978, 1981 and 1984. You can see how golden my childhood was. When Star Wars Episode I came out in 1999 and was as flat as a pancake, it felt like waking from a dream and finding that all the European Cups had been somehow erased from history.

I could go into extensive detail about why the 1999 film fell flat, but it would fill many pages and be fun for nobody, even me. I’ll just say that Ewan McGregor trying to be a young Alec Guinness didn’t work, and Liam Neeson wasn’t a convincing top Jedi.

The franchise rumbled on, fuelled by huge marketing, and was quite a success. I enjoyed the films, my wife bought them all on DVD, and we watch them occasionally. I like the films, but I don’t love them. The great denouement at the end of Episode III, which creates a bridge to the immortal Episode IV of 1977, was well done and more or less how I had imagined it when I was a small boy.

And that was it. Job done, six films completed, and now I could buy a complete box-set, safe in the knowledge that ‘the Saga’ was complete.

Enter Disney.

In 2012 the Disney Company bought the franchise for $4 billion. The first announcement was that there would be new films, set after the end of Episode VI (’The Return of the Jedi’), and there was a very real sense that Disney would be pulling out all the stops to make a return on their huge investment.

I had a very bad feeling about this.

How could Disney, famous for their safe but brilliant offending-nobody children’s films, possibly take on the weight of expectation and succeed where even the writer of the original film had failed? This was the company who had given the world ‘The Cat from Outer Space’.

I was one of the more sceptical. I really thought that they would bomb.

What I had neglected to understand is the way that Disney operate. They have so many dollars to throw at a project that it is unlikely not to be a success. They get the best people they can, they use the best filmmakers they can find, and they understand more than anyone else how magical and important certain films are to certain people. There must have been some really careful reflection before script writing began on the new Star Wars films began. As far as I am concerned they have got it very, very right.

The masterstroke was securing the services of Kathleen Kennedy to run Lucasfilm. Lucasfilm was what Disney bought from George Lucas, and it needed a steady hand at the helm. Kathleen Kennedy was behind the success of ET and Jurassic Park, knew George, but more importantly knew what the fans needed. She got Lawrence Kasdan, who had written the script for Episode VI in 1983, on board to write for Episode VII. To oversee the new project, she approached JJ Abrams, a Star Wars obsessive whom she knew was not going to mess it all up.

The result, of course, was Episode VII, ‘The Force Awakens’. It’s a pretty good film. It is no turkey. It does everything that the discerning obsessive might ask for. It has ballsy new characters, and because of Disney dollars managed to secure the original three actors from the first trilogy. It mirrors the plot of the original film of 1977 rather too closely for my liking, but it returned the joy and excitement with interest. It was just what I had been waiting for. Disney did what it is now well known for doing – it got the right people, spent the money, and turned a huge profit. On social media I sensed a whole generation of obsessives grudgingly accept Episode VII as a bona fide Star Wars film. They turned off their pac-man, drained the last of their full-sugar coke, and started to pay attention again.

Now it gets really interesting. With the rights to use the brand how they see fit, Disney are obviously going to be smart in how they get value for money. The newest film stands alone, fitting into the chronology of the nine main films, but with different characters. It’s a very clever move indeed. How to solve the problem of ageing? You develop films with the same backdrop, but with new characters. Just as all the Bond films exist in a strange super-cool world of gadgets and cocktails, but the faces change; so now all Star Wars films exist with the same hardware of space ships and aliens, but different heroes.

Sometimes it’s a problem that seems unsurmountable. For example, for the new film ‘Rogue One’ to work, a character called Grand Moff Tarkin needs to step into the action. In 1977 he was brilliantly portrayed by Hammer Horror actor Peter Cushing. Peter was born in 1913, so would be 103 if alive today. After a long and distinguished career, he passed away in 1994.

That is not a problem for Disney. They took loads of existing footage of him, put it all into a computer, and sort of melded his face onto another actor. The result is rather startling. The character is sinister enough to begin with. For adults who know that Peter Cushing is no longer with us, it is rather like watching a convincing ghost on screen.

People have been very critical of it, and say it looks like a cartoon character. I think there needs to be some suspension of belief, and you just have to let your imagination take you away. Be a child again, believe in the film.

It is another step on the road towards nothing being impossible on film anymore – certainly with the power of the Disney dollars behind it.

The new film, called ‘Rogue One – A Star Wars Story’ is worth a careful look. In a very subtle nod to the hard-core fans, the action ends moments before the start of the original Star Wars film from 1977. It plays with the memory of those who saw the first film as children, and adds substance to all our imaginings. It’s clever. It ticks all the boxes. Disney have done their homework thoroughly, and the care that they have taken means that the future of Star Wars is secure.

Finally, an observation for the fanatics out there. Here is my list, in order of preference:

IV, VII, V, Rogue One, III, VI, II, I.

If you know what that means, you now have my permission to get very cross and disagree with me most vehemently.