Dantooine Free Press

Disney has released its sequel to its creative twist on the Sleeping Beauty story, Maleficent, on its streaming service, Disney+.  Is the second movie, Maleficent: Mistress of Evil worth your time? The original Disney movie, starring Angelina Jolie in the title role, focused on the story of a young naive faerie, who fell in love with a human.  That human just happens to be the self-centered and ambitious Stefan, who violently betrays Maleficent in order to become king.  Understandably, rage over this betrayal infects everything this magical faerie does, up to and including turning the magical kingdom over which Maleficent rules, the Moors, dark, and cursing Stefan's daughter, Aurora, to die by pricking her finger on a spinning wheel when the girl is to turn sixteen.  Maleficent watches over Aurora, played by Elle Fanning, as she is raised in the woods, eventually comes  to recognize the young girl's innocence, and attempts to undo her curse, but to no avail....

I used to have this need to own, in one form or another, every chapter in the Star Wars movie universe.  Episodes four through six, I have on VHS.  I have the DVDs for episodes one through six.  I own online streaming versions of episodes four through eight.  I even own online digital versions of "Rogue One" and "Solo." Yet, for some reason, I was in no rush to own a version of episode nine, "The Rise of Skywalker."  Rather, I was very much content to wait until episode nine was available through Disney+ before I watched it again. This is not to say that I think episode nine is the worst in the series.  That honor goes to episode eight, "The Last Jedi."  It's just that I was in the hospital for an extended time recovering from surgery when "The Last Jedi" was released, and the fastest way for me to watch the movie was to purchase the online digital version.  If you could return a movie to get a refund, believe me, I'd want...

Let's get this out of the way.  Yes, the final Star Wars trilogy was pretty bad.  It started off promisingly enough.  I liked "The Force Awakens."  No, it wasn't the most original or creative of the saga's movies.  But it was entertaining, and coherent enough to allow Lucasfilm to build an extended story line from it.  Things went bad with "The Last Jedi." What became clear with "The Last Jedi" was that there was no unified vision of the last film trilogy.  While people like to complain about J.J. Abrams, he set up a number of interesting questions for subsequent films to explore.  They included Rey's parentage, the origin of Snoke and the First Order and could Kylo Ren be redeemed.  Rian Johnson decided to throw all of that away, and gave us a cynical story where the Resistance survived in spite of the saga's overarching hero, Luke Skywalker.  "The Rise of Skywalker" suffered, in large part, because Abrams had to undo muc...

It is seems to be fashionable among current Star Wars fans to trash the final three installments of the Star Wars saga.  Some critics even take joy in proclaiming Disney's efforts to continue the narrative initially created by George Lucas to be a miserable failure.  It may go against what's trending, but I liked the first of Disney's instalments in the final Star Wars trilogy.  I found Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens an entertaining extension to the original storyline, one full of potential for what the tale could be.  Sure, looking back, the last two films failed to live up to that potential.  Moreover, the first of the Disney films had it's flaws and it's plot holes.  It certainly was not the best of the Star Wars movies.  But looking back on them all now, including the two movies dubbed "Star Wars Stories" by Disney, which address tangential plots, I can easily say that The Force Awakens is within the top five of the entir...