I mean, wanting conflict in your Star Wars movies really isn’t that strange. After all, they are action-adventure movies with plenty of pew-pew, spaceship battles and lightsaber fights. The problem with the sequels is that it really feels like nobody wanted to think too hard about what that new conflict should actually be. So instead they reused the basic story beats of the original trilogy and dropped a new set of characters into what was essentially a rebooted version of the same world.
I think the conflict of the sequels should have been much more closely tied to the new characters themselves. That way you could have had something genuinely new instead of Empire vs. Rebels again with slightly different names.
But at the same time, I really feel like these movies were cursed from the start. The Skywalker story was basically finished. But Disney had just spent an enormous amount of money on Star Wars, so of course they weren’t going to buy it and then not continue the main saga. And because the original cast were still alive, leaving them out completely would have seemed insane too. So suddenly you have to incorporate actors in their 60s and 70s into a new generation of action movies while also introducing an entirely new, younger cast who are supposed to become the new faces of Star Wars.
I know a lot of people really wanted to see Han, Luke and Leia reunited, and emotionally I completely understand that. But from a storytelling perspective, I think it creates another problem: what is the story if they’re all back and everything basically worked out for them? Where does the conflict come from if they didn’t fail in some significant way? And how do you make the new characters feel important if the old heroes aren’t just there to pass the torch or occasionally guide them, but are still actively involved in solving the galaxy’s problems?
That’s why the sequels feel like a Frankenstein’s monster to me. I have a huge number of problems with the movies we actually got, but at the same time, some of the things fans complain were missing, and which often show up in fan rewrites, honestly sound even worse to me. Bringing back every old character, rebuilding the Jedi Order exactly as people imagined it, having Luke be an unstoppable Jedi Grandmaster, giving Han and Leia a perfectly happy marriage, and then somehow trying to create a meaningful new trilogy around all of that doesn’t automatically solve the fundamental problem.
I also find it kind of fascinating that the sequels tried to do almost the exact opposite of what the prequels did. The prequels were heavily concerned with politics, institutions, worldbuilding and explaining how the galaxy transformed. The sequels were almost afraid of all of that. They wanted to move fast, get straight to the adventure and recreate the feeling of the original trilogy without stopping to explain too much.
And somehow they still failed to make the new era feel particularly interesting or memorable.
Maybe Star Wars is just impossible to get right.
