Let's get down to a serious critical debate. When it comes to the new Star Wars movie, I liked the porgs – those cute little puffin-like creatures – and their relationship with Chewbacca in The Last Jedi gave me a warm, fuzzy, original-series kind of feeling. I'm not sure that I would go as far as to say they are better than Ewoks, however, and I found the vulptex, a kind of crystal fox, downright creepy. But I do take your point that the vulptexes actually have a function in the plot – to point our heroes to an exit from a cave – whereas the porgs are mainly there to sell toys.
Confused? Uninterested? Clearly you aren't a die-hard Star Wars fan ready to dissect the most minute aspect until its tiny heart stops beating. Fans feel an intense sense of ownership over the franchise, and their reaction since The Last Jedi opened last week has been decidedly mixed, with some vociferous outcry against certain aspects of the plot and development of the characters.
The Last Jedi racked up $220-million (U.S.) at the North American box office over the weekend and made $17-million in Canada, but that hasn't stopped social-media debate so intense there is now talk of a backlash against the movie. Unusually, on aggregator sites, critics are more positive about the film than regular viewers, reversing the usual relationship of skepticism about blockbusters; on Rotten Tomatoes Tuesday, the score was 93 per cent fresh for critics but only 55 per cent for viewers. (I'm among the 7-per-cent rotten, but my criticisms of the film are different from the fans'.) Various industry observers are now pointing out that these user numbers may have been juiced by a disgruntled few, but that still leaves some moviegoers angry enough that they've bothered to game the system.
Many of the fan complaints seem to be a reaction against the anti-heroic message of a film that portrays Luke Skywalker as a disillusioned retiree and allows a powerful female admiral to dismiss Poe Dameron as a flyboy who likes to see things explode. But it would be simplistic to paint the reaction as merely anti-feminist, just another example of that silly moaning about the female Ghostbusters reboot, because the Star Wars universe is big enough to allow multiple fan connections to back stories and character lines.
And that, apparently, is the problem. One of the significant complaints against The Last Jedi is the way it dispenses with the plots of the many spinoff novels published from the 1990s onward: Lucasfilm declared the Star Wars books "non-canonical" after it was bought by Disney in 2012. Han and Leia living happily ever after with three kids? Not on your Kylo Ren. Luke training a whole new generation of Jedi? Rey looks to be going solo. Having burned the apocrypha, the Church of Disney uses The Last Jedi to assert a new orthodoxy.
Reminded of their powerlessness in the face of a hugely wealthy papacy, the laity may roar, but will fan backlash make any difference at the box office? Probably not, since you have to see The Last Jedi to judge.