PULP & POPCORN

Page 35
Would I tell someone who hasn’t seen the film that that’s what I think it is
about? No, because that coin doesn’t drop until the third act and until then, you have
no idea that’s the point. That feeling of having that coin drop was part of the
experience for me, and I’d hate to be the one to take that from someone else.
In the case of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, there are numerous things that are
worth discussion that you can’t really bring up until people have seen the movie. I
went to a press screening of the movie on the Disney lot so that I could write that
early review I ran on the Pulp & Popcorn blog, but I also bought tickets so I could take
my sons, Toshi and Allen, as well as my girlfriend, her adult son, and his girlfriend.
We had a big family weekend that involved buying and decorating the Christmas tree
and lots of hanging out and having fun, and the weekend culminated in all of us going
to the Culver Arclight together to see the film. As we emerged from the theater, it
was clear that Allen was a little shaken up by it. He’s eight years old now, and he’s
precocious, constantly looking to demonstrate that he understands things like the
grown-ups do. I asked him what he was reacting to, and he struggled to find the
words. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a movie before where everyone died, Daddy.
Everyone. All the good guys. They all just died.” He kept shaking his head. “It’s a cool
movie, but that’s really sad.”
What strikes me about that is how, for the first time ever, there is weight to
the war in Star Wars. We live in a culture that glorifies war and that treats it as a rite
of passage to some extent. War-themed videogames are one of the biggest-selling
genres, and my own kids are addicted to several of the online Ca! Of Duty modes.
When Toshi recently bought Battlefield 1, I spent some time looking at the campaign
mode, and there was something they did that I found really interesting as a choice. If
you’re killed while playing the campaign, you don’t respawn as the same character.
Instead, that character is dead, and you have to play as someone else, and each time
you go down, that’s another headstone, another life memorialized, and the longer you
play, the higher that body count gets to be, and you start to actually get a sense of the
toll of each and every inch of territory that is won in a real war. Sure, it’s a game, and
sure, it’s still only 1/10,000th of the real experience, but it is an attempt to underline
the more sober side of what is being played as a game.