The Vatican's Film Critic Called the New Star War Movie 'Awkward and Tacky'

The film critic for L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper owned by the Holy See, saw Star War: The Force Gets Woke and didn’t like it as much as the overwhelming majority of critics did. This is funny for countless reasons, the most important being the image of bishops quietly saying things like “Chewbacca” and “Kylo Ren” while walking through St. Peter’s Basilica with their newspapers.

After criticizing its action sequences, which were described as “sloppy” and “lacking in dramatic value,” the unnamed critic spends the bulk of their review bemoaning the new film’s villains.

Reports Variety:

As to why the pic supposedly fails spectacularly in its representation of evil, the caustic critic claims that “Darth Vader and above all the Emperor Palpatine were two of the most effective villains in [the sci-fi] genre of American cinema.” But the film’s new villain, the Darth Vader-inspired Kylo Ren, is slammed as “insipid;” while Supreme Leader Snoke – the Emperor Palpatine-like character, is called “the most serious defect of the film,” with his representation described as “awkward and tacky.”

That someone who works at Catholicism HQ would find a representation of evil that doesn’t look or act like Beelzebub disappointing is unsurprising, but I’m sort of delighted to know they were willing to participate in the cultural conversation at all.

“Uno per Star War,” the old critic said, rolling his eyes and pretending not to care, while secretly being the most excited he’d been since Benedict stepped down.