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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Entertainment
Ben Child

Was my memory wiped or was the Star Wars sequel trilogy just that forgettable?

Oscar Isaac Disney Poe Dameron Memory Boba Fett George Lucas Han Solo Luke Skywalker Yoda
Oscar Isaac as Poe Dameron in The Force Awakens.
The force is weak with this one … Oscar Isaac as Poe Dameron in The Force Awakens. Photograph: Robot/Walt Disney/Rex/Shutterstock

There might just be a strange irony to this week’s news that Oscar Isaac, AKA the tousled X-wing pilot Poe Dameron, is up for a return to Star Wars if the script is right. Because before the actor’s comments in a new interview with Variety, it was quite possible to forget that the sequel trilogy ever existed. Was The Force Awakens really a film, or just two hours of Disney rummaging through George Lucas’s recycling bin? Did The Last Jedi split the fanbase so violently that Brexit looked like a parking dispute? And could The Rise of Skywalker really have stunk that badly?

The problem with the post-Lucas films is that they never quite decided what they wanted to be. The Force Awakens tried nostalgia cosplay. The Last Jedi tried to set fire to nostalgia cosplay. The Rise of Skywalker then tried to urgently stitch nostalgia back together again. The result was messy, divisive, and – crucially for Disney – almost impossible to spin off.

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