chyron8472 said:
KILLOFFPOE said:
So in almost every scene of the movie I had a knife twisting in my side about how bad this was and didn’t make sense. Makes it really hard to appreciate the good aspects.
You are seeing the movie as awful because you expect to see it that way. You have preconceived ideas about how the Star Wars Universe is supposed to work, whether you decided them on your own or were given them by EU. You feel the movie twisting a knife when that knife belongs to you.
You do not let the movies tell you a story on their own terms. You want it to be on your terms and are angry and frustrated that it doesn’t work that way. If you were willing to let the films tell their own stories and expand your understanding of the universe as you acquire more information about it, you would be able to accept and enjoy it.
But it doesn’t make sense that we could have sent people to walk on the moon because planes don’t crash into the ground when they fly in straight lines, so the Apollo missions must have been faked since we know the Earth to be flat.
I have to agree with your assessment, though I think your last paragraph is a bit off topic. DrDre was expecting ROTJ hero Luke, not old Mentor Luke. Such a fall is a mythic trope. I don’t know what some others were expecting, but whatever they expected they were disappointed. I was looking for a good story and I researched how likely Rian Johnson was to deliver that and was pleased with the potential and the final product met my expectations (being a good story). I watched Twelve O’Clock High and the space chase and the command structure wrangling and Poe’s lessons are so in keeping with that film. They lessons are very character specific and are quite different from that film, but you can see the same story telling at work. Finn starts out, once he wakes up, with a mission and Rose shows him that he should be on a different mission and he goes from someone traveling along with the resistance to being one of them. Rey is forced to face her parents. She was forced to face that they were never coming back in TFA, and in this one she is faced with them being just normal people, of no particular importance. Both revelations shake her to the core and her character has gone from looking for a place to belong to finding it (why else did she take the ancient Jedi texts). They stories played out in their own way and are nicely woven together to create a good final product.
TLJ has none of Abrams ridiculousness and his contrived story telling methods and sticks to traditional story telling, just like Lucas did in the OT. I felt that he understood the Hero’s Journey and Cambell’s work as well as the 30’s sci-fi serial and thee 50’s Samurai films that really gave Star Wars its flavor. It was a great middle chapter that gave purpose to Abrams film. Hopefully the ending that Rian was writing towards is something that Abrams can complete rather than doing his own thing. I see several paths to reach a conclusion, either not skipping time or skipping a few years. We shall see what IX brings. I almost wish they’d do what so many book series adaptions have done and split the next on into two films, but I think Rian had an ending in mind and I think I see part of what it is. I think he was going with Lucas’s balancing the force concept and this entire trilogy would be about finishing the prophesy.
And as for bringing this back to an Empire vs. Rebellion, isn’t that what the Thrawn trilogy did? True it was still the New Republic, but he brought the Empire back big time - bigger than the First Order (though we really don’t know how big it is, but the New Republic (whose capital and fleet were destroyed) in TFA is a lot smaller than the Legends New Republic. The Thrawn trilogy was something many considered as standing in the place of the ST or good material to adapt for the ST. But this is 30 years on instead of 10, and that is 30 years for a slice of the old Empire to grow and build a large military industrial complex that can put out huge ships and a lot of manpower.
I really don’t know what people were expecting from a sequel trilogy, but then again I don’t know what people were expecting from the prequel trilogy either. The story GL chose to tell wasn’t as iconic as the OT, which means it was never going to be as good, and then it was flawed with too much GL in the scripts and some strange directing choices that I can see and appreciate, but that don’t really forward the story. Abrams almost did better than GL, but Rian nailed what this trilogy needed and set a course forward. I have little confidence that Abrams will pull off a stirring finale to the saga on his own. But if he has script and editing help and is working off of what GL, Rian, or both, had in mind, it could be incredible. Or he could flub it like he did TFA.
