This past May, YouTuber Jenny Nicholson set off waves of social-media discourse with “The Spectacular Failure of the Star Wars Hotel,” a four-hour-long video critique of Disney’s hugely expensive, now-shuttered Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser in Orlando, Florida. Having gone viral enough to rack up over nine million views in less than two months, it’s arguably become more of a success than some recent Star Wars movies. In part, that owes to Nicholson’s having tapped into a growing discomfort, felt even among die-hard fans, with the transformation of an escapist space opera into an ever-vaster and less accountable business empire. The time has come, many seem to feel, to pop the Star Wars bubble.
Some, of course, have felt that way for a long time. “I dutifully thrilled to the earlier films, to their contrast of black-velvet skies and blinding white sands, but I was a little too old to worship them or study their variorum editions,” writes New Yorker film critic Anthony Lane in his review of The Phantom Menace, from 1999.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
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