Rian was right about the story following a natural beat and rhythm and not catering to fan service.
Last Jedi is far from my favorite Star Wars, but i’m also sick of films being bogged down by catering to ancillary merchandise, toy sales and Happy Meals. The story is the story.
I respect an artist, filmmaker or novelist telling the story they want to tell. Even if it isn’t the way i would have done it, even if Rian’s interpretation of Luke doesn’t fit mine.
I also don’t really accept how JJ saw the characters either. Han, Luke or Leia. They did an okay job for the other characters they created. Making Luke a Mcguffin and not a character to begin with was a bad start for episode 7. And JJ relied way too much on Mystery boxes he made up the answers to later. They tricked us with the map for Skywalker what was Luke searching for. What great mystery of the force was it something to help defeat the sith and the first order, no he wanted to die. It does not make sense 7 and 9 are from a different trilogy than 8, completely different visions sharing only the commonality of characters.
Either JJ should have written and directed all 3 or Rian should have.
I agree. JJ gets too much slack for TFA because he deliberately avoided answering the difficult questions he created. The fact that he centered the whole movie around the search for Luke and spent so much time hyping up Luke, treating him as though he was the incredibly important key to defeating the First Order, was a big mistake. This didn’t make sense, and it was lampshaded by Luke himself in TLJ (his “laser sword” line), but the problem is that it was TFA that established the expectation that Luke would be super important. So Rian had the choice of either playing along with JJ’s deification of Luke, or throwing aside that setup from the previous movie. Neither was a good option.
With an ideal sequel trilogy, they could have found some sort of middle ground. Luke could have been a wise, respected mentor on the periphery of the story, but not an overpowered mcguffin.