10 Things That Annoy You About New Star Wars That Didn't Bother Original Trilogy Fans

Arguably the biggest recurring complaint from the anti-Disney Star Wars (and anti-Kathleen Kennedy) critics is that the whole thing has become far too political. It's just supposed to be a fun adventure story (in which most of the characters are coincidentally white males), they insist, there's no reason to alienate people by connecting events of the fantasy film universe to the politics of the real world.

It got to the point where a relatively innocuous, and indeed indubitably truthful, remark from Rogue One writer Chris Weitz that audiences should "note that the Empire is a white supremacist (human) organisation" was met with such an outcry that Weitz had to issue an apology for "politicising innocent escapism."

That Star Wars has from the start been a story in which the villains are an oppressive, authoritarian, militarised regime explicitly and unsubtly coded as Nazis is obvious to any viewer, but the original trilogy wasn't just using the iconography of the historical struggle against fascism to make the baddies easily identifiable as such. It was also quite happy to reflect the contemporary politics of its day.

Star Wars was a 1970s independent picture and George Lucas was one of the era's "movie brats" alongside the likes of his close friend Francis Ford Coppola. These were films and filmmakers that emerged from the era of America's disaster in Vietnam, the corruption of the Nixon government and the Watergate scandal and these movies reflected that. It's no surprise, with that context, that the jungle dwelling ewoks are able, like the Viet Cong, to defeat a vastly more equipped military superpower.

As Lucas would say, when writing prequel trilogy years later, "It was really about the Vietnam War, and that was the period where Nixon was trying to run for a second term, which got me to thinking historically about how do democracies get turned into dictatorships?"