Okay, so not long ago I did a post about the new Star Wars movies, you can read it here.
However something happened which made my jaw drop. An accusation so mind-numbing it can be hard to wrap your mind around it. What happened you say?
It appears that after some research by a professor in some California university more than half of those who had negative criticism towards Rian Johnson were Russian bots, or trolls.
You can read the story here from the Hollywood Reporter (not the best I know, but it’ll do).
Its becoming truely amazing at how desperate the defenders of this movie are to sink down to this. Then again, everything is either Trump’s fault, white males’ fault, racism, sexism or Russian bots.
It seems as if one cannot have an opinion of a movie now without it being political, or claims of sexism, racism or now being a Russian bot. However I don’t understand this one at all from the fandom viewpoint.
Why would Russian bots criticize Rian Johnson and The Last Jedi? What do they gain from such a thing?
This is something the left would do, claim this to deflect how bad TLJ really was.
If one actually goes on-line and looks you’ll find many real people who have real complaints about the movie. These are die-hard fans who bought Star Wars merchandise, played the games, binged the movies all weekend long, and who went to see previous movies three, four or more times in the theater.
These are also the very fans it seems Disney’s Star Wars hates. They’ve called them names, said the movie wasn’t for you, and now, they are Russian bots.
But all this is off ‘research’ from some professor (some doubt here from reports) who studied some 930 tweets which were replies to Rian Johnson. And of those he kept only the negative ones, and of those only 50% were ‘bots’.
As a result of this research you have media suddenly announcing that the criticism was done by Russian trolls and bots.
I didn’t like The Last Jedi because it was a poor movie, but with this bit it seems more like the battle to like/dislike the movie is moving more and more political. After all, its the left which has claimed Russian interference in the last election.
Now, Russian bots are to blame for the fall of Star Wars. Can’t blame the real problem poor writers, plot, characters and execution.