The final chapter is supposed to be a pay-off, but a pay-off to what?
I feel the same.
I agree that different is good, risks are good, and nobody wants to be spoon-fed obvious, predictable stories. But TLJ left me with no plotlines or stakes to really care (or even wonder) about going into the next film. By the third act of any story I should be aware of what we are working towards and what I’m supposed to be hoping each character will or won’t achieve.
Also… I’ve heard a lot of people either praising or criticising Rian Johnson for the decisions this film took. Do you really think RJ was in charge here? I’m pretty sure this film was made by a committee. There’s no way they’d let some director come along with a bunch of weird ideas and just let him run with them at the risk of torpedoing the master plan. Gareth Edwards had to reshoot half his movie and Colin Trevorrow was fired because he wouldn’t play ball. RJ is a hired gun like the rest of them, no?
JJ pitched his Episode IX story to Kathy Kennedy yesterday.
It’s RJ’s ideas, but she has to approve, and it has to align with the Story Group during.
So while they were making TLJ nobody actually knew (even loosely) what the overall arc of the new trilogy would be?
That sounds like a really dumb way to make a trilogy.
How is that any different from the OT?
Lucas never had much of a plan for any of the OT sequels before he actually started to work on them.
He may not have known specifics but he probably had some overall thoughts on how things might end up (which inevitably changed and evolved as things went on).
Admittedly Lucas didn’t know everything right from the start, and it’s obvious that stuff like Vader being Luke’s Father was thought up later, but the fact that Lucas was one guy forming the story means that he was at least thinking in ‘big picture’ terms when he made (most of) his decisions.
Also, and this is a key difference, Star Wars ‘77 was released as a stand-alone movie. It wasn’t announced as the first part of a trilogy right off the bat like these new films have been. If you announce a trilogy you should probably have given some thought to what that trilogy looks like, story-wise, rather than announce 3 movie then make it up as you go along.
As such, this trilogy is like that game where you fold a piece of paper and each person takes it in turns to draw a head/torso/legs then unfold the paper and see what weird monster drawing you end up with.