A LONG time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, Star Wars movies used to be good.

They featured interesting characters doing cool stuff — flying spaceships, shooting laser guns, rescuing princesses from evil space knights.

Today, under the rule of the Disney Social Justice Empire, Star Wars movies feature boring characters standing around giving cringe-worthy motivational speeches and crying.

Does anyone remember the scene in A New Hope where Luke Skywalker, sniffling as tears stream down his face, gives a two-minute monologue to Obi Wan Kenobi about his childhood and how the Evil Empire killed his uncle Owen and aunt Beru and how he hates, HATES them and they’ll never get away with it and he’s going to RESIST, as music swells and the camera cuts to Obi Wan’s face beaming with pride?

No. Owen and Beru get killed, Luke arrives just in time to find their charred bodies, looks sad for a second and tells Obi Wan, “I want to learn the ways of the Force and become a Jedi like my father.” Then he f***ing gets on with it and doesn’t cry like a [non-gender-specific person] for two-and-a-half hours.

Or what about the iconic scene in the Mos Eisley Cantina where Han Solo meets Obi Wan for the first time. “I’m just a lowly smuggler,” he giggles nervously. “I’ve never met a JEDI HERO before!” Oh wait, that didn’t happen either. Han Solo didn’t care about Obi Wan. He called him a crazy old man and laughed behind his back.

People didn’t really care about things that much in the original films. Or if they did, they didn’t stand around talking about their feelings — they just did things, and we sometimes felt things as a result. In the new movies, everyone cares about everything, and they have to tell each other all the time, and as a result the audience feels nothing. The drama is forced, but worse, it’s completely unearned.

For three movies now, following The Force Awakens and Rogue One, these characters feel like children dropped into a Disney Star Wars theme park. (Gee, why might that be?) Every two minutes they stop to remind each other they’re in Star Wars. Remember Luke Skywalker? Remember Han Solo? Remember the Force? Any second you expect them to turn to the camera and go, “Can you guys believe this!?”

When they’re not reminding each other of things that happened in previous movies or even previous scenes in the same movie, they’re talking at great length about what they’re going to do in the next scene — usually with tears in their eyes, inspirational music and the word HOPE mentioned at least twice.

There are so many things wrong with Rian Johnson’s abomination it’s honestly hard to know where to begin — the criminal waste of Luke’s final film appearance, the nonsensical plot (since when has space fuel been an issue in these movies?), completely pointless casino mission, flying space Leia, Rose’s entire character, the Phantom Menace-level awful “Resistance Kids”.

To be fair, many of the problems were inherited from J.J. Abrams’ slightly less awful predecessor — Rey the Mary Sue, emo Kylo Ren, the existence of the First Order completely invalidating the defeat of the Empire and the entire original trilogy — but Johnson somehow manages to make everything worse.

From unceremoniously killing off Snoke to dismissing the importance of Rey’s parentage to turning the ending of The Force Awakens into a literal throwaway joke by having Luke chuck the lightsaber, The Last Jedi is almost painfully self-aware in rejecting the previous film.

But in doing so, it feels like Johnson is rebooting the new trilogy in the second film. Not exactly a good sign. As terrible as The Force Awakens was, it’s made retroactively worse in the knowledge that none of the mysteries it introduces actually matter, and yet we’re stuck with these godawful characters and status quo.

One of the most annoying things was the fact that the best scene — the hyperspace kamikaze — was wasted on the worst character to ever appear in a Star Wars movie, instead of being given to Admiral Ackbar, a fan favourite and established character, who was instead killed off-screen and referenced in one line of dialogue.

Having read the glowing critic reviews, it felt like they had seen a completely different film. But then, as Meryl Streep, sorry, Laura Dern, literally turned to the camera and delivered a purple-hair speech to the Oscars crowd, sorry, spaceship, about RESISTING, everything made sense.

As bad as the George Lucas prequels were, at least they felt like they took place in the Star Wars universe. These new movies feel like a parody of Star Wars — a combination of Nickelodeon special and bad Saturday Night Live sketch.

George, we forgive you. Is it too late to bring back Jar Jar? I want off this Disney ride.

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At last! World CD premiere of original score from mega-hit fourth installment of wildly popular ROCKY saga, starring Sylvester Stallone as iconic boxer, with Talia Shire, Burt Young, Carl Weathers – and formidable Russian opponent Dolph Lundgren. Original album featured songs plus two excerpts from score. Intrada release offers entire score by Vince DiCola, including his arrangement of classic “Theme from ROCKY” by Bill Conti. Unleashed at last is rich score, initially for keyboards, ultimately for large orchestra. Many highlights include haunting piano/cello theme for “Apollo’s Death and Funeral”, powerful “Up the Mountain” sequence, dynamic “Training Montage”, powerhouse “War”, epic “Knockout” for full orchestra. Intrada presents score in crisp, punchy stereo mixed directly from original 24-track digital masters courtesy of Sony. Vivid artwork courtesy of MGM, enthusiastic liner notes by Daniel Schweiger. Finally, biggest gap in Rocky soundtrack series is delivered! Vince DiCola composes, produces. Jeremy Lubbock orchestrates, conducts.

While the two Avatar films released by 20th Century Studios and James Cameron thus far have centered on Jake (Sam Worthington) and Neytiri’s (Zoe Saldaña) Na’vi family, other characters and mythologies have helped expand the world of Pandora. One such aspect is the plight of the Tulkuns, whale-like creatures who inhabit the waters of Pandora and are a large focus of Avatar: The Way of Water. One specific Tulkun named Payakan ended up befriending Jake’s son Lo’ak, while also having a human enemy in Brendan Cowell’s Mick Scoresby, a mariner who hunts down Tulkuns and harvests their bodies for priceless resources. It’s now been revealed that Cowell will be returning as the character in Avatar: Fire and Ash.

As part of Empire Magazine’s ‘Path to Pandora’ series, where the publication releases a new look at the film every month, the latest image features Mick on a boat with a robot arm and a grudge. The last time Mick and Payakan went head-to-head in the third act of The Way of Water, Payakan tore off the mariner’s limb with his own steel cables. Cowell told Empire that when discussing Fire and Ash with Cameron, they decided to take the character in a darker, more vengeance-fueled direction, saying:

“What Jim [Cameron, director] and I talked about for Scoresby in this film is how he arrived as this wind-in-the-hair cowboy-of-the-seas in the last one, out to make some bank, have some laughs. He’s not in it for the wind, the hair, the laughs, or the money this time. He lost his last fight; he knows there’s this generational, ancestral hatred towards him, and so this time it’s personal. It’s destructive. And in terms of what he wants to do, it’s probably a little more violent, too.”

A recurring theme for Avatar: Fire and Ash seems to be the hatred that brings out the worst in people. Whether it’s Colonel Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang) and his obsession with killing Jake Sully following the death of his own human body at the end of the first film, or the Mangkwan Clan (known as the Ash people) as the primary antagonists for the sequel, it seems a lot of characters will be fueled by their hatred. Cameron himself said that he chose the title Fire and Ash because it represents the “anger, hatred, violence” associated with fire and the “aftermath” of grief and loss represented by ash.

It will be interesting to see how big a role Payakan ends up playing in Avatar: Fire and Ash, and how the character uses their incredible size, strength, and intellect in their fight against the humans who constantly attack and exploit their kind. Payakan’s friendship with Lo’ak could also be explored further, especially since the first trailer already teases tensions between Lo’ak and his father, Jake. Fans will be able to experience all the intense character dynamics and action when Avatar: Fire and Ash hits theaters on December 19, 2025.

Grover Carr Furr III (born April 3, 1944) is an American professor of Medieval English literature at Montclair State University, best known for his books on Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Union. He has published many books on this subject.

The University of British Columbia (UBC) is a public research university with campuses in Vancouver and Kelowna, British Columbia. Established in 1908, UBC is British Columbia’s oldest university. The university is ranked among the top 20 public Universities worldwide and among the top three in Canada. With an annual research budget of $600 million, UBC funds over 8,000 projects a year.

The Vancouver campus is situated about 10 km (6 mi) west of Downtown Vancouver. UBC is home to TRIUMF, Canada’s national laboratory for particle and nuclear physics, which houses the world’s largest cyclotron. In addition to the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies and Stuart Blusson Quantum Matter Institute, UBC and the Max Planck Society collectively established the first Max Planck Institute in North America, specializing in quantum materials. One of the largest research libraries in Canada, the UBC Library system has over 9.9 million volumes among its 21 branches. The Okanagan campus, acquired in 2005, is located in Kelowna, British Columbia.

As of 2017, eight Nobel laureates, 71 Rhodes scholars, 65 Olympians, ten fellows in both American Academy of Arts & Sciences and the Royal Society, and 208 fellows to the Royal Society of Canada have been affiliated with UBC.Three Canadian prime ministers, including Canada’s first female prime minister Kim Campbell and current prime minister Justin Trudeau have been educated at UBC.

The main campus is at Point Grey, approximately 10 kilometres (6.2 mi) from downtown Vancouver. It is near several beaches and has views of the North Shore mountains. The 7.63-square-kilometre (1,890-acre) Pacific Spirit Regional Park serves as a green-belt between the campus and the city. Buildings on the Vancouver campus occupy 1.09 million m2 (11.7 million sq ft) gross on 1.7 square kilometres (420 acres) of maintained land. The campus street plan is mostly in a grid of malls (some of which are pedestrian-only). Lower Mall and West Mall are in the southwestern part of the peninsula, with Main, East, and Wesbrook Malls northeast of them.

The campus is not within Vancouver’s city limits, and therefore UBC is policed by the RCMP rather than the Vancouver Police Department. However, the Vancouver Fire Department provides service to UBC under a contract. In addition to UBC RCMP, there is also the UBC Campus Security that patrols the campus. Postage sent to any building on campus includes Vancouver in the address.

UBC Vancouver also has two satellite campuses within the City of Vancouver: at Vancouver General Hospital, for the medical sciences, and at Robson Square in downtown Vancouver, for part-time credit and non-credit programmes. UBC is also a partner in the consortium backing Great Northern Way Campus Ltd, and is affiliated with a group of adjacent theological colleges, which include the Vancouver School of Theology, Regent College, Carey Theological College and Corpus Christi College.

The campus is home to numerous gardens. The UBC Botanical Garden and Centre for Plant Research, the first UBC department, holds a collection of over 8000 different kinds of plants used for research, conservation and education. The UBC botanical garden’s original site was at the “Old Arboretum”. All that remains of it today are trees planted in 1916 by John Davidson. The old arboretum is now home to many buildings including the First Nations House of Learning. The Nitobe Memorial Garden, built to honour Japanese scholar Inazo Nitobe, the garden has been the subject of more than fifteen years’ study by a UBC professor, who believes its construction hides a number of impressive features, including references to Japanese philosophy and mythology, shadow bridges visible only at certain times of year, and positioning of a lantern filled with light at the exact date and time of Nitobe’s death each year. The garden is behind the University’s Asian Centre, which was built using steel girders from Japan’s exhibit at Osaka Expo.

The campus also features the Chan Centre for the Performing Arts: a performing arts centre containing the Chan Shun Concert Hall, Telus Studio Theatre and the Royal Bank Cinema. It is often the site of convocation ceremonies and the filming location for the 4400 Center on the television show The 4400, as well as the Madacorp entrance set on Kyle XY. It has also been featured as the Cloud 9 Ballroom in the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica (Season 1, Episode 11: Colonial Day).

Since the mid 1980s UBC has worked with property developers to build several large residential developments throughout UBC’s campus. Such developments include: Chancellor Place, Hampton Place, Hawthorn Place and Wesbrook Village.