LEGO Star Wars: Rebuild The Galaxy – Pieces of the Past Is Fine Enough
Pieces of the Past Is Not As Much Fun As Expected
The first issue I have with LEGO Star Wars: Rebuild the Galaxy—Pieces of the Past is that the title is pushing the limits of what I would expect from any piece of media, movie or otherwise. I’m going to call it Pieces of the Past for the sake of clarity, but it’s an absurd name. You have to know so much pop culture to not be confused by that cascade of nouns.
The second issue is that it’s a massive dip in quality from the first Rebuild the Galaxy mini-series. The jokes aren’t as good. The action is lacking for most of the series—only picking up to its potential a few times. And the storyline is built on incredibly shoddy ground.
Let me be clear on that last one, because I mean a very specific aspect of the storytelling. The stuff that you would say in a summary works fine. The ideas that underpin Pieces of the Past are solid. Sig’s struggle to convert his brother to the Light Side was an open plotline from the first movie, and I’m glad they continue it here. And making a villain who leverages the cyclical and dimension-altering gimmick of this series for big force attacks was a great idea. But moment-to-moment, throughout the adventure, Pieces of the Past is nothing but fetch quests and deus ex machina saves.
These Main Characters Are Apparently Quite Lucky
I’m not kidding—and I may have ruined not only this series but a lot of action-oriented movies for you by pointing it out. Once you notice a story working like this, it’s hard to stop noticing. It goes like this: characters need to go to a location to find a person or thing, then there’s some kind of battle or discovery at the location, and then they need to find another person or thing. It just goes on like that for the whole freaking runtime. And occasionally during such travels, it looks like a character is going to die or lose, but they are saved by an offscreen swoop-in by some character that we haven’t seen in a few minutes. It’s fine if a movie does this once or twice. I wouldn’t be able to sit through Marvel movies if I couldn’t tolerate it—but it’s overtaken Pieces of the Past to an obnoxious degree.
Speaking of obnoxious, the character of Servo is both the most annoying and unnecessary sidekick character I’ve seen in a while and does multiple of those “swoop-ins” over the course of Pieces of the Past. He solves the plot so many freaking times and cannot help but pepper the dialog with these terrible “jokes.” I think removing Servo from the show would’ve actually made this into a positive, if medium, review. Seriously, he brings it that much down. He highlights the flaws that much.
Pieces of the Past Is Almost Ruined By A Character
Like when Servo’s not ruining scenes, there’s a lot of good stuff. There’s plenty to enjoy during those fetch quests. Pieces of the Past has a great voice cast, an amazing villain, and lots of fourth-wall breaking that—while not getting laughs out of me—where at least thought out and clearly come from an absolute adoration of Star Wars as a franchise. Bothering to include as many characters, locations, and unresolved threads as they did, while also utilizing a fun, exciting animation style and letting characters actually die, shows that they were committed to making this feel like some lost part of the Star Wars’ timeline, not some parody/comedy series that relies entirely on juvenile jokes.
I’d actually be perfectly happy to see a third entry in this series, despite my complaints. It is a Star Wars thing, after all—it would only be traditional to have a third installment. They just need to find a few better jokes and then, more importantly, really consider how to make this wacky world with overpowered characters feel like it has any stakes anymore after dealing with a universe ending villain. I don’t know if that’s possible, but I can say that—even if nothing more happens—I’m happy to have found this cute little series. Let the LEGO team tackle some other franchise.
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