I heard that there was a new Star Wars movie out, and that many of my Christian friends were going to see it. I passed on it, because there is something about that whole series that is creepy to me.

It looks like my concerns have some justification. I noticed a couple of reviews of the movie from Come Reason Ministries and Bnonn Tennant.

Here are 3 points that Lenny makes at Come Reason: (H/T Brian)

Faith and tradition are disposable You don’t really need to put in years of work to be competent Men are inconsequential

All three points he makes seem to me to be exactly what the movie communicates, but I want to focus on point #3:

The most obvious message The Last Jedi sends is the one that Johnson clearly sought to send, that is that men offer nothing uniquely beneficial to society. The main protagonist, Rey, is female. So are all the leadership of the Resistance. Kylo Ren and Snoke are bad guys and are men. The double-dealing code-breaker is a man. The arms dealer is a man. […]As the film progressed, its agenda became more overt and more satirical. It is the women in this film who time and again save the day while the men just mess everything up. Poe is a hotshot who recklessly expends a number of lives taking out a ship that makes no difference in the rest of the film. His later plans are shown to be useless as Laura Dern’s Vice Admiral Holdo had a plan in the works all along. […]The egregiousness of this fiction is distressing. Men have long been the punching bags of media. War is an ugly thing, but it is and has always been men who time and again put their lives on the line to protect us from the evils that threaten our way of life. Men would willingly die to save women and children because they understood the weaker needed protection by the stronger. But now our society says the unique thing that makes men men is itself dangerous. It needs to be checked and men need to behave more like women. When you take away a man’s self-understanding as provider and protector, you rob him of his place in the world. Why then would men in this or future generations stand up and put their lives on the line when a real enemy?

I really like what he had to say here. Let’s look at one more from Bnonn Tennant, then I’ll say something. (H/T Wes)

Excerpt:

Throughout the second act, we are led to believe that Holdo [female] is an incompetent coward who has effectively frozen under pressure—stuck in a holding pattern rather than chancing anything risky in the hope of saving the fleet. An entire story arc is developed to support this assumption, where Poe [male] takes matters into his own hands with a dangerous hail-mary—building to a great anti-climax where this B-plot finally flops instead of paying off as the audience expects, and Holdo is revealed to have had a better plan all along. Many reviewers have expressed their frustration at how pointless this lengthy arc was—a misdirect and plot twist for the sake of saying “gotcha” rather than creating a payoff in terms of character development or plot advancement. But they are interpreting the movie through the framework of what makes a good story rather than what makes a good leftist porno. From that perspective, this was feminist gold. In a scene reminiscent of Isaiah 55:8–9, the revelation of Holdo’s providence is unveiled—a mystery kept secret for long ages. We discover that she has been leading the fleet to a secret rebel base all along, sacrificing ships like chess pieces along the way in order to establish an unassailable stalemate in the end-game, rather than lose the king. (Sorry, the queen—in this chess game, the king and the queen swap places—obviously.) It is the perfect feminine plan: one without fighting, in which the security of the collective is ensured. And by contrast, we see that Poe’s plan was reckless and foolhardy—pointlessly risking his life, and the life of Rose (who herself serves no particular purpose except to meet the racial-diversity-body-positivity quota), on a gambit that ultimately failed. His masculine impulse to solve the problem through direct action blinded him to the greater feminine wisdom. Worse, it nearly cost the entire Resistance their lives, as he sabotaged the female leadership through mutiny—and it did cost Holdo her life, as she had to buy the Resistance time after Poe’s plan backfired and alerted the First Order to the fleeing transport ships. But why didn’t Holdo just confide her plan to Poe in the first place? Because she shouldn’t have needed to. Ultimately, Poe’s greatest sin was not his taking action—it was his taking action out of a failure to recognize and trust in the transcendence of feminine wisdom. His sin was faithlessness. Masculine arrogance prevented him from faithfully submitting to Holdo.

Women know how to do everything through intuition, and men with their “skills” and “experience” and “courage” and “problem-solving” just screw it all up.

I guess I want to say that this is why I don’t give money to Hollywood. I have not owned a television since around 2002. The only time I see what’s on television is in the gym, or at my parents’ house for family gatherings. I wouldn’t want to give my money to people like Clinton-donor and sexual harasser Harvey Weinstein or Kathleen Kennedy, the radical feminist president of Lucasfilm. I don’t like art that misleads, and pretty much everything that comes out of the entertainment industry these days misleads entertainment-addicts about what is real and true.

We are living in a culture where Christians have – for decades – failed to steward their money properly. Instead of refraining from funding secular leftist enemies in the entertainment industry, we have been giving them money for the rope that they are using to hang us. Politics is downstream from culture, and we made the culture by enriching secular leftists in the entertainment industry. Why? Because we couldn’t be bothered to hold every thought captive to Christ. We had to have our fun, and we are sure that God, if he exists, really just wants us to act to satisfy our desires so that we can be happy. We have to have our NFL football, our Comedy Channel news, our 50 Shades of Grey books, our Game of Thrones and our House of Cards. “Take our money”, we tell the secular left. If the special effects and CGI are good, then we’ll eat the sewage.