The film misinterprets basic concepts of the Jedi and the Force … acting like the Jedi are meant to be pacifists.
I don’t think TLJ is the one misinterpreting basic concepts of the Jedi and the Force.
That’s not what Yoda meant in context. The Jedi are meant to defend the innocent, and that often involves striking down those who would harm others. ANH has Obi-Wan cutting off an assailant’s arm. They absolutely are willing to resort to the use of force to fight someone who threatens innocents. That’s why they carry lightsabers in the first place. This notion that a “true” Jedi doesn’t actually even use his saber to defeat someone is a misinterpretation by Rian Johnson of what the Jedi actually are. Striking down Kylo, or at least genuinely trying to talk him down, could have saved countless lives and ended the war. This notion of a Jedi being purely pacifist never reflected George’s vision or intention. Rian doesn’t know Star Wars better than its creator. In fact, I think there are a lot of people who understand Star Wars better than Rian does.
Also, Rian misinterpreted “Balance of the Force” to mean “the balance of Light and Dark.” This is sadly a very common misconception, when George clearly stated that “balance” meant the destruction of the Sith. The Sith are not a natural result of the Force achieving balance. They only exist as an unnatural corruption of it that must be purged.
I mean, honestly, the worldbuilding is barely existent in most Star Wars movies. 90% of the worldbuilding in the movies is in ANH, and 9% is in ESB. The other 1% is split between the other movies, unless you count the prequels contradicting the OT as worldbuilding. This isn’t necessarily a defense of the newer movies, I kind of feel like Star Wars’s worldbuilding alternates between stagnation and just openly contradicting previously established stuff. It’s all either living in ANH’s world without expanding upon it, or forgetting basic details to make way for lazy, boring sludge. But that’s sort of beside the point.
The PT has massive amounts of worldbuilding. That’s the prequels’ strongest area by a large margin. It took me watching the sequels to appreciate just how much the prequels expanded the world and made it feel so much larger and more complex and developed. The prequels don’t have as much history exposition as the OT, but the sheer volume of worlds, species, factions, and cultures introduced in the PT provided so much fertile ground for new stories to tell and history to flesh out. It’s genuinely quite impressive, and it makes me believe that the prequels aren’t entirely the cynical cash grab some people make them out to be (the sequels, on the other hand, are entirely a corporate cash grab). George was bursting with story and worldbuilding ideas that he genuinely wanted to bring to the screen. The OT and the PT together, while not lining up perfectly, provide a surprisingly fleshed out world, which served as a launchpad for stories that expanded the universe in countless directions. The Sequels are a massive step down in terms of worldbuilding from the previous films.
I don’t know. I’m not George RR Martin, but worldbuilding has been a hobby of mine since I was like 14. In some ways more conlanging than other aspects of worldbuilding, but whatever. I’m not a published author, but I still feel like I’m knowledgeable on this subject.
The worldbuilding I’ve done as a hobby, the worldbuilding done in other hobbyist communities, the worldbuilding talked about in RP circles, the worldbuilding talked about in every other fantasy story and its fandom, that’s all one thing. And then you have people talking about Lucas’s genius worldbuilding or how the sequels had a complete absence of it, and it’s like… what do you even mean by worldbuilding?
Because I can’t even say “No, that’s not worldbuilding, that’s X. Worldbuilding is Y.” because I have no idea what this worldbuilding even is. Outside of AHH and a little bit of ESB, the movies tell us pretty much nothing about the history of the galaxy, the cultures of the galaxy, the peoples of the galaxy, the individual planets of the galaxy and any details on them besides, like, a biome or two.
The OT films tell us about the history of the galaxy. The PT actually shows us a period of that history in action. All the new species, planets, and factions introduced had their own unique cultures. The prequels didn’t go out of their way to spell out a planet’s culture to us, but the basics could usually be inferred from what we were shown, and it leaves fans curious to know more about those worlds without taking time away from the main plot. We finally got to see the Republic and the Jedi and how they functioned. We got to see the different corporations that formed the CIS. There’s this constant sense in the prequels of things happening off screen on all these different planets. The worlds actually feel like societies that go about their business even when the cameras aren’t on them. By comparison, you never get the impression in the Sequels that things are happening when the heroes aren’t there. Every planet is just another set for action to take place on. They only exist when the cameras are actually focused on them, and most of them look earthlike and generic to avoid being seen as too “prequelish.”
The ST does have some rudimentary worldbuilding, but it’s so barebones because JJ wanted his soft reboot, so he wrote a movie that actively discourages its audience from thinking about what’s happening in the galaxy.
I mean, yeah, a sequel to LotR wouldn’t work. The ending to LotR has cosmological significance. It’s the end of an era of reality itself. The ending to the Star Wars Trilogy is more character-oriented, the story ends here it’s where Luke becomes a Jedi and the conflict between him and Vader is resolved. To the galaxy, the events at the end of RotJ are almost incidental. Sure, it’s a big win for the Rebels, and Vader and Palpatine dying are pretty important, but there’s no way anything significant changes in the state of the galaxy. It’s been the butt of jokes for as long as I remember and it’s no surprise that in both Legends and in the New EU, not only do Imperial Remnants, pretenders, successor states, and Empire-adjacent factions live on for a really long time after RotJ, but the Empire proper lives on for a while after RotJ. 7 years in Legends and a little over a year in the New EU.
I have absolutely no problem with the Empire surviving for years post-RotJ. I do have a problem with the Empire rising to full power out of the blue with no buildup within the lifetimes of the original characters, and tearing down everything they worked for with nothing surviving. You can still have the Empire exist as a faction. But the ending of RotJ still needs to mean something to the world as a whole. Because it was absolutely meant to.
Maybe you could invoke some of the Chosen One stuff from the prequels. Anakin fulfills the prophecy and it has the same cosmological significance as destroying the One Ring, but the Chosen One prophecy was always something arbitrarily slapped onto Star Wars decades after the fact. The OT has nothing to do with it, and it seems that George Lucas was quick to abandon it, considering that one of the four ST ideas he’s had that we know about involves Leia having been the real Chosen One.
Nevertheless, the Chosen One prophecy is etched into the canon now, and whether it was George or someone else making the sequel trilogy, it would be important to honor that and make the story work within the context of the prophecy. George came up with the prophecy partly to give RotJ’s ending a greater sense of finality and importance. The ending wasn’t just a personal victory for Luke. It was the destruction of the Sith, and a crushing blow to the Empire that they shouldn’t have been able to fully recover from, at least not off-screen.
Before the prequels, maybe you could make some OT-centric era argument. Star Wars is fundamentally about the Empire and the Rebels, so the story of Star Wars has to end with the end of the Empire, which is at least bound to happen by the end of RotJ. Which, back in the 80s or 90s when Star Wars avoided anything too far before or after from the OT, fair enough, but the prequels have kind of blown that door wide open. Now we have so many wildly different eras of Star Wars, it’s almost inevitable that a sequel dealing with the galaxy 30 years after the OT would have happened.
Which makes it all the more a shame that they decided to rehash Rebels vs. Empire again. As you said, Star Wars had grown beyond just being about those two factions. And again, I’d be fine with this new Empire existing as long as it wasn’t just a more cartoonish copy of it with comically oversized, overpowered super weapons, and if we had a proper New Republic instead of just a Rebel Alliance palette swap. And there were several EU stories set decades after the OT that introduced brand new factions to oppose the New Republic, in addition to the different splinter factions of the Empire with their own distinct cultures and divergences from one another. That makes way more sense than the First Order.
Not so with Lord of the Rings. I don’t think I need to explain myself here, but while there’s tons of stuff written by Tolkien which details what goes on long before Lord of the Rings, there’s absolutely not for after Lord of the Rings. Even with what goes on before Lord of the Rings, it all relates to the events of Lord of the Rings. There’s no Knights of the Old Middle Earth.
Sequels to Star Wars and Lord of the Rings would be wildly different, and while one is pretty much doomed by the basic facts of the story, the other feels almost inevitable.
The Sequel Trilogy was never inevitable for any reason beyond lust for profit. The prequels actually added something significant to the story. They gave a greater sense of context to the OT and its characters. Granted, it did a sloppy job, but the effort was there. It worked to close the circle and end the story where the OT began.
The sequel trilogy only makes any sense in a meta context, not an in-universe one. It does nothing to complete the story. It only undermines what came before. That’s why I said the sequel trilogy was built on a rotten foundation. It’s part reboot, part sequel, but it’s a sequel who’s choices can only be justified in a real-world context. And in the end, regardless of whatever TLJ tried to do, the trilogy’s still just an inferior copy of the OT with some of the components scrambled around. That’s why it’s worse than the prequels. At the very least, the prequels were something.
Also, as a side note about Finn, I absolutely believe John Boyega when he says that his role in the trilogy was diminished and sidelined on account of his race. And that disgusts me more than anything else about TLJ.