No three cheers for this double trilogy

People who managed to be uninterested in the first five Star Wars movies (and our name is legion) have an extra incentive for being uninterested in the sixth: This cinematic franchise now consists of not one but two trilogies. It’s not that a trilogy is necessarily a bad or a silly thing. Sophocles, for instance, is thought to have done some nice work in that vein as he put Oedipus and company through the wringer. But there’s an inescapable note of the ridiculous in using something as monumental as a trilogy to package something as lightweight as pop culture. In This Is Spinal Tap, one telling clue that the boys in the band are pretentious knuckleheads comes when Nigel Tufnel says a chord progression he’s noodling with is “part of a trilogy, a musical trilogy that I’m doing in D minor, which I always find is the saddest of all keys.” The laughter this elicited from moviegoers ought to stand as a warning to all would-be trilogists.

—Posted by Mark Dolliver

May 18, 2005 | Permalink