Hal 9000 said:
… the finished film in isolation would imply to me that he was just not interested in carrying on the themes and setups the previous film gave him to work with.We’re not the only ones to have an issue with his desire to put the franchise on its ear. There is an interview with Daisy where she says as soon as she read the script she went to Rian and said “we need to have a talk about what’s happening here”.
I wasn’t interested in several parts of JJ’s film, Snoke and Phasma among them. However, Rian just discarding them seems lazy and/or disrespectful to all the work that went into them in TFA; actors, designers, costumers, writers,etc. They were presented as major characters, much to the delight of a huge portion of the fan base. All the fan speculation the past two years was all for nothing.
Rian treated them the way major characters are treated on Game Of Thrones - You found the character and their story interesting? - too bad. That’s the main reason I stopped watching GoT. It became a waste of time. I’m not terribly interested in the ST. But I am glad it’s back in the hands of JJ.
I think the problem here is a misperception. Neither Snoke nor Phasma were a big part in JJ’s film (in fact I’d bet their combined screen time is under 10 minutes). They were only ever important insofar as how they relate to Kylo Ren and Finn’s characters, respectively. I don’t see how RJ betrays that in anyway, all he does is acknowledge that Kylo and Finn have moved beyond them. And killing them isn’t tossing them aside or being respectful to them - honestly both their parts were much more interesting and consequential to the story this time around.
Snoke didn’t have much screen time but it was made obvious that he plays a massive part in the overarching back story as to the events unfolding in the ST. He’s an integral part to Kylo’s character and made to be a bigger threat than the emperor in TLJ. By killing him off so suddenly without providing any explanation to the no doubt hundreds of various questions people had come up with in the initial viewing and subsequent 2 years wait in between, his threat became a wisp of smoke (Snoke might as well have been as thin as smoke for all the depth he was given in the end) and by extension massively compromised and lessened both Kylo’s threat and his depth of character due to all the possible branches of story between him and Snoke that much got killed off in the process.
Phasma never had any real backstory or purpose in either movie and seemed to simply be there to market a shiny new toy. Her character really was useless to the plot of either movie and I couldn’t care less (unfortunately for the actor involved) that she’s supposedly dead, would have preferred her not to even come back in TLJ.
.Val