I just don’t get it? Like, even if you didn’t like TLJ, it’d be better to at least try to follow up on that. What we got was transparently bad improv. Surely there was a better way to address the criticisms of the prior movie, while also doing something else that could feel like a continuation of it. Anything else!
As someone who loves TLJ, it’s honestly baffling. I mean, I had fun, but for all the wrong reasons. TROS was just ridiculous to me. I think I honestly would have hated it, if it wasn’t so cavalier in its capitalistic cynicism, honestly to the point of unintentional humor.
From Palpatine’s reappearance in the crawl, to when Rey was about to say “Rey Skywalker” I was laughing at how soulless and corrupt it dared to be. It was so shameless about everything it did. It reveled in it. I had fun watching the film eat itself alive. You could just see the puppeteers of every faux-emotional moment straining themselves, as well as you could their strings tied hastily to Carrie’s rotting corpse as a marionette. They couldn’t justify the existence of these movies at all.
Everything truly interesting and meaningful about the sequel trilogy was discarded in favor of what? Nothing here was genuine or good*. I’m only holding onto the idea that they made it as comically hollow as they did out of spite.
*well, save for babu frik. and genuinely threepio’s best movie imo
As someone that hates TLJ, I agree it is very odd to not logically follow on from TLJ at this point with TROS to try and salvage a narrative that could span at least 2 concurrent movies instead of this weird convoluted patchwork / director tug of war you get going on that ultimately makes the entire Disney Trilogy a pointless mess. Obviously they heard many of the criticisms aimed at TLJ but failed to understand the impact and lasting fallout from them which was that many fans have become outright apathetic to Star Wars altogether or entirely dismissive of the Disney Trilogy and you were never going to get them back into cinema seats anyway so why pander to their TLJ criticism to the point that you make the movie irrelevant to it’s own trilogy?
I like your line about watching the film eat itself alive and for me, I’d apply that to TLJ as well due to how meta it is. The whole trilogy is so self aware that it literally comes off at this stage as a spoof than any kind of respectful continuation to Lucas’s legacy.
This might veer a little off topic, but the biggest difference between TLJ and TROS for me is that their meta-natures come from different places. TLJ does it in earnest. Johnson is aware of our expectations, but basically begs the audience to scrutinize his work because there is something there. The result may be unwieldly but it’s not soulless. For as much as people say it ruins the originals’ legacy, it’s really just putting the same understood conventions under new thematic tests - by the end reinforcing Star Wars’ ideals of heroism and redemption through perhaps a now stronger, humanistic lens. He broke some rules, introduced some logical quandaries, but it came from a good place. And even if you disagree with his vision, I still felt like Johnson had a reverence for the franchise that permeated the film. Basically saying: This is why Star Wars matters, and how we make it matter moving forward. Like the capability for good in TLJ, Star Wars doesn’t have to be an exclusive club. It’s not a perfectly realized vision by any means, but the self awareness served a thematic purpose. Johnson’s vision at the very least had integrity.
TROS willingly shuns anything TLJ said that might justify why a sequel trilogy should exist, to vaguely placate fans. It doesn’t make any decision based on what it could mean or say about anything. Any exploration of why we should care is forgone to tie us onto a moving rollercoaster, with a villain audiences already know. The self-awareness is used as winks and nods. You can practically hear the “fuck it, this is what they want right?” It’s a product designed entirely by talking points we’ve all heard over and over again in the past two years. It’s cynical and manipulative. Where TLJ had a beating heart and lungs, TROS is barely a Frankenstein of calculated choices.
Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed the ride that was TROS - probably more than my initial TLJ viewing - but it wasn’t because it was any good. It was so tenaciously cynical that I couldn’t help but enjoy how low it was willing to go to earn its paycheck.