December 24th, 2012 
Dane Sager 
What The Film?! is a weekly column exclusive to Under The Gun Review that brings to light the plot holes Hollywood hoped you’d never notice. Written by comedy writer Dane Sager, this column shows no mercy to films that try and pull the proverbial wool over our eyes.
If you know a film with major plot holes that you feel needs to be exposed, tell us! Email utgjames@gmail.com with the subject “What The Film” and we’ll try to get your suggestion featured on the site.
It’s that time again where we unite as a family and celebrate what’s important in life: cheap toys that were made in China. Similar to last year, I had a hard time trying to figure out a Christmas movie to dissect and destroy for people. I suppose that puts me on the naughty list. However, unlike last year’s take on Miracle on 34th Street, this year I will do a movie more in line with my style. Something awful, something dated, something… Star Wars.
Because Star Wars has never done anything stupid before.
It’s an exciting time to be a science fiction/fantasy fan. We have three more entries to the Lord of the Rings franchise, an upcoming Justice League movie, an ongoing successful and awesome Avengers franchise. We have another Star Trek movie coming out that will continue the new and surprising trend where Star Trek is cooler and less nerdy than Star Wars, and we have Disney purchasing LucasFilm; promising to continue the franchise in an ongoing fashion, similar to the James Bond franchise. If you’re not excited about that, then you seem to forget that the only worthwhile Star Wars movies are the ones George Lucas only vaguely helped shape. I’m not going to go out and say that the prequel trilogy “raped my childhood” like so many idiots have said before. People who say that the Star War sprequels “raped their childhood” have the same logic as people who say that gay marriage hurts straight marriage: it didn’t and it doesn’t.
To lighten the mood, here’s a screen capture from the Holiday Special containing Chewie, C3P0, Luke, and what looks to be Benedict Cumberbatch mixed with a foot.
Side note: When you take a pre-existing video (lets use The Star Wars Holiday Special as an example, even though we’ve all seen music videos and SNL skits do this too) and you upload it to anything (Piratebay, Mediafire, YouTube, so on), all you’ve done is uploaded a video. You had absolutely nothing to do with the production of the video. You don’t have to add a 30 second intro for “Asssaulted Nuts Productions” to promote yourself because you literally had nothing to do with it. It’s like how some DJs will put their own hype track on a popular song before putting it back online. I don’t care about “Assaulted Nuts Productions” or you. You uploaded a video someone else made. Get over youself.
Comic Sans? Are we twelve now?
Now The Star Wars: The Holiday Special came out in 1978, making it the very first official Star Wars sequel, beating The Empire Strikes Back by two years. The made for TV special involved the gang going to Kashyyyk, the planet that Chewie came from, in order to celebrate “Life Day” with his family. Now, I won’t talk about the issues with canon because it’s Star Wars; it would be surprising if there weren’t severe continuity issues with the rest of the franchise.
Is this Chewie’s father or a Lady GaGa costume? You had to Google it, didn’t you?
The first twelve minutes of this have absolutely no dialogue. This isn’t like I Am Legend, where we see Will Smith silently going about his day to day life to set the tone for the movie. It consists of Chewbacca’s family grunting and yelling confusedly and watching some weird future television. You could call this world building, but it’s really like a weird performance art piece, testing your limits to see what you’ll sit through if someone slaps Star Wars on it (the prequel trilogy being an extension of this experiment).
The very first dialogue in the movie is Chewie’s family talking to Luke and R2D2. If you know the franchise, you’ll realize that the only person who speaks English in that group is Luke. He has to carry the entire conversation himself in a group of five characters. Ernest Hemmingway couldn’t have written that dialogue and made it not really bad.
Hemmingway said the job of a writer was to write the truest sentence he knows and this writer definitely knows Grarraaaaarrrrrraaaaaaaaa
The “story” continues with Chewie’s family watching television while waiting for Chewie and Han to show up. This takes up a significant chunk of time, showing us an awful cooking show hosted by a four armed chef who appears to be on cocaine. He feels much more Futurama than Star Wars.
Other TV shows consist of what appears to be live feeds of Darth Vader searching for rebels (I guess reality TV), a six minute long song that took forever to fast forward through, some strange circus act, and many more.
All of the main cast seems appears to show up in video calls asking to speak to Chewie and Han, only to be told that they aren’t there yet, much to their frustration. A local trader shows up and despite the empire searching Kashyyyk for the rebels, he literally introduces himself to complete strangers as “I’m a friend of the rebellion and a member of the alliance!” because he probably has a death wish.
Pictured here is Chewie and Bob Dylan
The movie feels like an extended Tim & Eric sketch, cutting between unrelated segments with low production values, an animated segment, and even a Jefferson Starship performance for absolutely no reason. The difference is that Tim & Eric couldn’t make something this awkward and painful to watch if they tried. It flows as if you took several unrelated books on tape, put them into iTunes and put it on shuffle. As another chapter ends, you get an unrelated 10-15 minute chapter from another book that doesn’t relate in anyway. And they’d all be Star Wars fan-fictions. You keep hearing rumors about how bad this movie is, and you don’t believe it because it can’t be that bad; it has to at least be funny-bad, right? No. It’s worse. It’s not funny bad. It’s just bad bad. It’s very bad bad.
The absolute worst part about this movie? It was the debut of Boba Fett. The most loved character in the Star Wars canon came to be in this movie in an poorly animated sequence that gave C3P0 eyelids that horrifyingly blinked for some reason. It’s one of the most painful thing I’ve ever had to watch for this column, so Merry Christmas everyone. I already received my coal, it’s called “this movie”.
Still better than the prequels
Dane once made the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs. You can follow him on Tumblr and Twitter!
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