(Wintery Knight) I heard that there was a new Star Wars movie out, and that many of my Christian friends were going to see it. I passed on it, because there is something about that whole series that is creepy to me.
It looks like my concerns have some justification. I noticed a couple of reviews of the movie from Come Reason Ministries and Bnonn Tennant.
Here are 3 points that Lenny makes at Come Reason: (H/T Brian)
- Faith and tradition are disposable
- You don’t really need to put in years of work to be competent
- Men are inconsequential
All three points he makes seem to me to be exactly what the movie communicates, but I want to focus on point #3:
The most obvious message The Last Jedi sends is the one that Johnson clearly sought to send, that is that men offer nothing uniquely beneficial to society. The main protagonist, Rey, is female. So are all the leadership of the Resistance. Kylo Ren and Snoke are bad guys and are men. The double-dealing code-breaker is a man. The arms dealer is a man.
[…]As the film progressed, its agenda became more overt and more satirical. It is the women in this film who time and again save the day while the men just mess everything up. Poe is a hotshot who recklessly expends a number of lives taking out a ship that makes no difference in the rest of the film. His later plans are shown to be useless as Laura Dern’s Vice Admiral Holdo had a plan in the works all along.
[…]The egregiousness of this fiction is distressing. Men have long been the punching bags of media. War is an ugly thing, but it is and has always been men who time and again put their lives on the line to protect us from the evils that threaten our way of life. Men would willingly die to save women and children because they understood the weaker needed protection by the stronger. But now our society says the unique thing that makes men men is itself dangerous. It needs to be checked and men need to behave more like women. When you take away a man’s self-understanding as provider and protector, you rob him of his place in the world. Why then would men in this or future generations stand up and put their lives on the line when a real enemy?
I really like what he had to say here. Let’s look at one more from Bnonn Tennant, then I’ll say something. (H/T Wes)