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Incorrect. All three were crap because no one sat down to create an overall three part story at the start.
Director A went in Direction 1, but Director B was allowed to do whatever the hell he wanted and went in Direction π with no intention to bring us back to even an integer direction. Director A then led us into imaginary numbers which led to a steaming pile of a trilogy.
Johnson laid down plot threads for Rey and Luke (and possibly a redeemed Ben) to address the failures of the jedi order and create a new path for force users. I was completely hyped at the announcement of the 9th movies title Rise of Skywalker as I was envisioning Skywalker to become the name of grey jedi, who don't forsake attachments. Along with a final battle of Rey vs Ben, while overlapped a battle of force ghost Luke fought a spectral Palpatine. What we got was a child angry someone tried to do something they couldn't understand with their toys.
Johnson had plenty of direction in his movie, most fans were just hurt that Luke wasn't lionized like the EU had done with his character. TLJ's Luke was a 180 from what everyone was expecting (Hamill included) and that left a bad taste in alot of peoples mouths. It was 100% in character for him to become a hermit though, look at everyone of his mentors.
When Mark Hamill dislikes what was done to Luke then what was done was wrong. The whole bitter hermit approah was stupid and is Luke repeating the mistakes of his mentors.
TLJ undermined a ton of character development for the sake of subverting everything including what little internal consistency existed in the Star Wars universe.
I love Hamill, I love Luke. After reflecting on the movie for a few a months, the portrayal of an aged fallible Luke was honestly inspired. It humanized him instead of mythologized, all it needed was to stick the landing in the third movie. Luke's plot wasn't over just because he died, he still needed to guide Rey and understand how the failures of the Jedi led his father to become Vader. Self improvement isn't a linear line, it has it's ups and downs amd we have to keep trying to do better even after we fuck up. That is the story we got, it's relatable as fuck.
That would have been an endearing and ultimately satisfying end point for a nine movie franchise spanning decades.
He was already humanized in the original trilogy by not cutting off all his feelings and family connections (Jedi side) or falling so far into his feelings that he became a monster (Dark Side), but by striking a balance between the two and overcoming evil alongside his friends.
A better story would have been showing his training and becoming disillusioned at how hard it was to teach people to strike a balance instead of making that a flashback of absolutes where one dark thought undid all of this experience in balancing good and evil. What we got was awful and made Luke a caricature, not relatable.
Hell, they already had a decent premise for Luke’s self-exile but explored it in the wrong way imo.
Rather than have Luke go “I failed myself because I was about to give into fear to protect the ones I loved”, they could have framed it as “I failed myself because I was ready to kill somebody I loved to protect the ones I loved” or something along those lines. They could literally keep all the footage the same and just change Luke’s reasoning to something that would be 100% in character for him and would rattle him to his very core after the realization. Like, that would been a very dark thing for Luke to experience and live with - and it would explain the self-imposed exile waaaaay better because if he failed his core beliefs, then could he fail anyone?
Sadly, we instead got… well, whatever we got in TLJ’s character assassination of Luke.
Johnson laid down plot threads
That he severed moments later. Yes. That was the biggest issue with his flick, in how he sabotaged any new interesting characters and material at the onset, providing with a rather good ending, but leaving with nothing appealing to follow.
The first 6 movies pretty conclusively covered the failure of the jedi order and their flaws. TLJ is a lazy retread of this beaten to death point. We did get the whole rich people sold things to both sides point, but it's purely surface level and doesn't get explored to any degree.
It left the resistance at a ship full of people and the big bad being kylo who already got beat by Rey in 7 and outsmarted by Luke in 8. He somehow has to redeem himself in 9 while allowing the rest of the bad guys to remain bad, because if he's actually the leader he can just stop everything.
Luke's mentors were hermits because they were in hiding. It makes no sense for Luke to hide from a galaxy, there wasn't an empire actively hunting him. Him being in hiding was JJ's fault, but the reason was entirely left to Johnson and he fumbled it.
TFA was a lark, and it was infinitely more watchable than any prequel, but TLJ was less than it could have been precisely because JJ did nothing interesting. In that sense, TFA was a movie wasted on being a palette cleanser. TLJ reset the board with a more compelling supreme leader, a Jedi that was ready to move forward instead of living in the past, a potential new relationship with the Force, and supporting heroes that were ready to be more than they'd been created as. It explored what the Luke that JJ hinted at in TFA would have to be, and made him a snarkier version of Dagobah Yoda before letting him begin fixing the problems that Jediness created.
It was not perfect. The slow speed chase was a terrible framing device that left enough nerd-questions that it became distracting, even for me. Canto Bight did drag despite being shorter than people think. Finn's arc was too narrow a bump from his TFA arc, though it was handled with more grace. Leia Poppins was fine conceptually (she was out there less than a minute, just force pulled something, and it all sent her into a coma), but it looked a little goonie and unfortunately left people feeling unsatisfied after Carrie Fisher's death. Holdo plot was thematically excellent but executed a little too "gotcha" style in having us root for Poe's harebrained scheme for too long. Rose was not really a character meant to develop, but rather an embodiment of the spirit of the Resistance, but that made her a little less likeable than she could have been. The your-mom joke was cringey, and something less in-your-face would have served the narrative purpose.
Still, I found its flaws pretty skin deep, and I really appreciated what it was trying to do. I was very annoyed that TROS took so many pains to actively and explicitly shit on it. If they were improv students, Rian would be kind of exasperating, but thoughtful and still squarely in the realm of "Yes, And...." JJ in TROS was more like, well, somebody else.
I still don't understand why anybody lets J. J. Abrams make anything after the clusterfuck of Lost.
I appreciate that he managed to make both Star Trek and Star Wars fans very angry. That took serious skill.
Director A didn’t even go in any direction with the first movie, TFA is practically ANH with different window dressing. TLJ was probably the best half-of-a-movie with the Rey and Kylo bits, and even then it’s moreso a case of “the best of the worst” than it being a good movie on its own merits. Then TRoS comes in and basically ruins the future of the franchise because JJ is a fucking hack who has only made one decent movie in his entire career. Also doesn’t help Disney shafted Boyega and Isaac hard in TLJ and TRoS, and that they literally had the entire plot point of Finn being Force-sensitive explored in the Lego Holiday Special rather than the mainline movies.
Now we see Disney is trying to keep the franchise afloat with all of these shows that always take place before TFA. But once we filled in all the gaps between each movie from 1-6… when are we gonna see something new from Star Wars that takes place after TRoS?
Disney have to bring in shows that take place prior to the sequels because their only attempt at anything extraneous to the movies within the “sequel era” was Resistance which went over poorly.
When it comes to the sequels, it’s that Spider-Man meme of Abrams and Johnson pointing at one another over who ruined what more. Abrams started a very basic, formulaic trilogy that had very clearly intended plot points; Rey was going to be the hidden of child/grandchild of Luke, Kenobi, Qui-Gon, whomever, Finn was going to be this Trooper-turned-Jedi character we’d never seen before, and Poe was going to follow a Han Solo archetype. Rian decides that this is banal (it was) and throws out everything that was loosely started in TFA to “subvert expectations”, which would have been fine if Rian had started the trilogy.
Asinine as the rehashed plot of TFA was, Rian shouldn’t have taken the project if he had no intentions of following through on those loose plot points. Instead, TLJ has no connection to TFA and is a horrible second entry point in a trilogy. I would have welcomed the idea of Rey being a complete nobody and that the strongest Force-user is just a random person, not connected to the Skywalkers, but TFA didn’t allow for that. TFA shoe-horned this trilogy into unoriginal, simplistic storytelling, and you can’t suddenly throw out everything that was setup and offer nothing in its place.
TFA set us up with a ton of questions to be answered: what was Rey’s connection to the Skywalkers, how will Finn become a Jedi, what did Luke create following RotJ and why did he abandon it, who/what is Snoke, how did this First Order come to be and gain power after the end of RotJ… TFA opens the door, with the intention of the second act answering all these questions, and the third act showing good prevailing over evil once again. TLJ, however, doesn’t bother to answer any of the questions or expand any of the new characters presented to us. Then in comes TRoS like a wrecking ball, trying to make connections back to TFA and failing hard as it reverts everything that TLJ reverted.
In short, Disney figured they’d bought the golden goose and all they had to do was just sit in on the nest to rake in the billions, but forgot you need to actually feed and nurture the damn thing. They gave two hack directors no boundaries and then stood with Shocked Pikachu face when they produced a hacked up story.
What Disney need to do is just claim that the “end” of the Skywalker saga is part of Legends, recast Luke, Leia, and Han and give us something that resembles Heir to the Empire, or create something entirely original, so that we have an actual sequel to the OT.
I love your post and how you hit the nail on the head with a lot of things.
I think the biggest downfall of the trilogy, even bigger than the whole pissing contest between 2 directors, is the lack of a cohesive plot outline for the trilogy. No idea if they even had a creative bible or something, but were the sequels even written out as a whole trilogy in the first place? It seemed like each movie was written in isolation from one another rather than having some outline of the story beats and character arcs unfold over the course of 3 movies regardless of the actual writing and directing done. It’s a shame too because we get to see some really fuckin cool shit from the sequels never play out, like the Knights of Ren, Finn being Disney’s take on Kyle Katarn, Poe potentially being a more war hero kind of take on the Han Solo archetype, Rey being a Palpatine and her struggle with the Dark Side, Kylo struggling with a pull to the Light Side, a jaded and bitter Luke, exploring the idea of some people supplying both the good and bad guys in a war… like, there was so many cool things they introduced, and then they either wrote it out in the worst possible way like with Luke’s character assassination in TLJ or the idea got ruined or tossed aside in the next movie like Snoke and the Knights of Ren.
I think one reason people aren’t so keen on the sequels is because of how much potential the sequels squandered for… honestly, I can’t think of any reason. And I don’t think Disney will ever say the sequels are non-canon and do what you mentioned at the end; at best, we’ll either start to go back to the High Republic era, or we’ll go far enough into the future that the sequels wouldn’t matter for the story - and the sequels would be canon, but never spoken of outside of maybe a reference here or there.
I think one reason people aren’t so keen on the sequels is because of how much potential the sequels squandered
When it comes to rage over the sequels, this is exactly it.
There was so much they could have done with the little bits that they did give us, but then they went nowhere with any of it…mainly because they never decided on a cohesive outline for the overall story. It’s like a tale of piss-poor project management; no one is at the helm and everyone on the ship is too busy doing their own thing to notice that the ship is sinking.
I think what also gave the sequels a bitter taste was how criticisms were handled within social media, both by Disney and the fanbase. If you didn’t like TFA, “well you just hate that the lead is a lady!” If you didn’t like TLJ, “well you’re just too simple to appreciate Johnson’s brilliance!” If you didn’t like TRoS, “well here are 15 tweets and a Fortnite message that explain the movie better, and you only hate it because you never realized that Star Wars was always a small world!” Instead of taking note about the criticisms of TFA and ensuring that the subsequent films were stronger and cohesive, Disney ignored everything and let it flounder.
There was so much that could have been done and yet, it was all just left to rot. And now, all Disney have are the shows to keep the IP alive altogether.
no one sat down to create an overall three part story at the start.
I still can't wrap my head around that. It's just so stupid. Did they think the movies would be successful by the brand (and nostalgia) alone?
And now we get Dave Filoni's key-jingling "remember this".
Best reply thus far to this flamebait post!
Every new movie in this fucked up "trilogy" was really just shitting on the last movie.
So one may shit (legitimately) on the third movie (I don't even remember the title, lol), but they won't admit that it's partly because Galaxy Brain Johnson ended his pretentious movie with ZERO interesting story to tell, having killed both the arch-nemesis and Luke... among so many other appealing characters. This could have just ended there, as a two-parts Star Wars saga with a crappy storyline involving some Galactic Empire 2.0 and its Supreme Leader we're told nothing about.
There was one man who carried the sequels hard. One man that no matter what shit the sequels threw at him he turned to gold. Yet here you are implying he couldn't have been the central antagonist for the last movie?!
Also so what Luke died in some epic space wizardry?! Force ghosts meant he could have played just as big a part in the final act. That's not the detriment you claim it to be.
Yeah it’s embarrassing to see adults engage in a tug of war like they did. With all their money and all the years they had to plan those movies, it’s ridiculous that they couldn’t plan out a three act story, and wound up with one director going rogue.
Okay hear me out. Has Abrams ever written a coherent ending?
It wasn't leading the story anywhere, it was a plot contrivance that hamfistedly side loaded a "war profiteering bad" message that's been in Star Wars since at least the Clone Wars and done far better there.
Not only that, but the concept is being explained to the child soldier turned rebel as if he doesn't know that it's bad. He should be the one explaining it to Rose, but we can't have that because she's a girl boss with no obstacles to overcome or ignorances to set straight. All of her problems are external and no further self improvement was possible.
TLJ at least tried something new. Granted, it didn't work. But it was better than just rebooting and rehashing the same old thing over and over again.
At this point I statistically just don't like SW anymore. Like, there are only three I am comfortable calling "good" movies (New Hope, Empire and Rogue One) and the others are somewhere between "just okay" to "so bad that it's annoying to watch".
And at this rate, Disney is gonna put out a new THING every year, so like.... Who even cares anymore?
This was the true Star Wars Sucks Wednesday I was hoping to see.
Wait... what's wrong with Return of th- Oh... it's the Ewoks, isn't it?
%1000 this. But even for all the bad things about Canto Bight, it had something to say about the Star Wars universe and how we should feel about the way Disney intends to use the property and that was crazy clever.
For sure, it's biggest issue had more to do with the way Finn and Rose had to leave a lightspeed chase and go have casino hijinks, while the chase was ongoing. It just was really bad from the pacing perspective.
Having a side quest where nothing was accomplished and they did a trivial amount of damage that would immediately be undone was crazy clever?
I'm sorry but Grey Jedi are aberrations of Legends. A jedi who is balanced in the force is just a Jedi. You cannot balance with the dark side, it is corruption. I don't see them making it to the big screen, and if they do I don't see it making sense or being good.
There's also people who don't agree with the jedi institution, but they aren't jedi, just force users. That's what I think the "gray jedi" theme should be. Those who recognize the flaws of the jedi institution but are light side still. The jedi are just so tied into the light side themes in Star Wars that they won't critique it in the mainline stories.
Its just one of those things thats not gonna translate well with a 2 hour movie. Like in the videogames, being grey works because the sark/light side indicator is a slider and YOU control your actions. In the supposed lore of the movies, the dark side is like an addiction and even using it once can send a jedi spiraling. So it just doesn't translate well. Its cool in the games to shoot lightning and then turn around and heal someone. In the movies, it just doesn't mash well with what is established.
I mean things like Ray burning the books from the jedi order should be where things shoot for the not jedi but not evil characters (except actually following through with it). Characters who are still good, they just don't follow the jedi order, which is not the ruling body of the light side, just the body that has the most control within light side force user groups.
by this logic, johnson also couldn't understand a fellow creative's vision
3 threw the plot of 2 in the bin, but only because 2 had already thrown the plot of 1 in the bin
Your not entirely wrong, expect there was so little plot to 7, it was a rehash of 4 with little to no characterization given to the people it introduces.
Finn is a stormtrooper traumatized by the death of a fellow trooper in the first scene, only to be whooping at killing them himself about an hour later. Why is the Falcon on Jakku? Anakin's lightsaber?!
Those are good questions... for another time
Went to new and interesting places
But where?
Canto Bight
......
Ima just going to leave this here… it’s what we should have gotten!