I don’t think we’re really arguing at all though! Just a thorough discussion. I apologize if it seemed otherwise!
I get what you’re saying, but this applies to pretty much all directors, showrunners, writers, etc.
i don’t think that’s necessarily true, But even if I agreed with that - why would the fact it applies to all directors/showrunners/writers (those three things are three very different things, btw) be any sort of rebuttal to the points I’m making? If it applies to them, it applies to him. So what’s wrong with the criticisms I’m making - which are aimed more at people who are willing to carry his water for the sake of minimizing his shortcomings than they are at him and his actual shortcomings as a storyteller?
A big part of what I’m criticizing here is the inclination for people to essentially transform collaborative art into singular authorship for the sake of championing a “visionary” for negligible reasons. It was wrong when they did it for Lucas’ benefit, and it’s still wrong now. I’m not so much trying to downplay his contributions as I am fighting against the idea his contributions are as essential to Star Wars’ continued success as they are often claimed to be.
I also think, while I’m at it, that he benefits not JUST from the proximity to Lucas (pay attention to how often his praise is essentially backhanded, as if he’s a vessel for Lucas’ genius instead of a creative in his own right - even Freddie Prinze essentially framed him as such when he went viral on twitter sticking up for him) but also from the fact he’s got a bit of a handicap because he works in children’s animation. Because so many people honestly believe that’s a “lesser” medium, and that stories “don’t count” as much in that medium as they do in live action, his successes end up being appreciated to a somewhat unfair extent - they read it as his being so good he transcends the medium, when what’s happened is they’ve opened themselves up to what that medium can do in a way they don’t normally do for other practitioners of that medium. If they did, they’d likely discover there are a lot of people who are just as good, if not better in many ways, at what Filoni does as a showrunner.
Favreau is the showrunner on Mandalorian, anyway. Filoni is a supporting player to that end. I don’t think he’s an equal there. He’s a key element, but it’s Favreau’s show.
I think people are more or less substituting all the same things they used to say about George Lucas (before he inevitably disappointed them in one way or another because they were too busy buying into every last myth about his creative process) onto Filoni now. He’s not really a visionary - a huge percentage of his Clone Wars successes are essentially “which really old movie these kids haven’t seen shall we loosely adapt this month.” It’s not so much “clever homage” as it is strip-mining classic film. Which - again, you can argue “that’s what Lucas did” because we all know the story about The Hidden Fortress, etc… but that plays into my larger point that Filoni gets a lot of rope simply because he “does things” the way Lucas “did things” as if the mere fact that Lucas did them makes them good.
The fact he gets credited for all of “The Clone Wars” despite the fact he had a ton of help in the form of other directors, writers, contributors, animators, voice actors, etc… it’s the same mistakes everyone made with Lucas, just mapped onto a different “visionary.”
It’s not that I dislike him. Like I said, he’s probably better just being “The Story Group” than he is being a hands-on creative. But I don’t think he’s as necessary as people tend to make him out to be, and I think he’s got big problems as a storyteller that get papered over because of that Lucas connection, and the familiarity and habitual nature of just repurposing old forum arguments ABOUT Lucas, and just copy/replacing with Filoni’s name.
The lowest parts of the Mandalorian are all his. And to be fair - many of the lowest parts of The Clone Wars are ALSO all his. I don’t think the “leap” to live-action has very much to do with it at all, because those low points have a lot in common across both mediums. And the things he’s been good at are things other people are also good at, and some people (Favreau, Waititi, Chow, Famuyiwa) are already better at. He’s not as necessary to Lucasfilm’s success as people like to frame it. He’s been part of very good things. I don’t think he’s the answer. He’s PART of AN answer. But I think Star Wars’ future is best served not by consistently asking “What would George Do” and looking to Filoni for not much more reason than “he’s the next best thing to George.”
I’d personally be fine with all future SW shows, both live action and animated, being Filoni-esque.
I wouldn’t. This show’s lowest points are the ones Filoni directed and wrote. The highest points are the ones he has the least involvement with.
“Filoni-esque” doesn’t really mean much, either, since the only real identifiable hallmarks of Filoni’s storytelling are, as stated by his biggest fans:
George Lucas talked to him a lot.
He likes Princess Mononoke.
Filoni’s status seems to be less earned than it is an easy substitution exercise: All the ways fans used to unfairly deify Lucas as a storyteller supreme are just being mapped onto Filoni now because George Lucas handpicked him.
The thing Filoni has most in common with Lucas is that his storytelling instincts are sound but his execution is lacking and he’s probably better off being “The Story Group” than he is actually involving himself in directing or writing.
That’s my main problem with the movie. JJ didn’t want to make a meaningful movie, he didn’t even want to make a good movie, he just wanted a big dumb blockbuster that lots of people would enjoy without really thinking about it.
I don’t think it’s even this purposeful, honestly. I don’t think there’s really much to why this movie is a mess beyond two (possibly three) simple factors.
Time.
JJ Abrams isn’t good at ending stories, or understanding why good endings work.
2.5) Chris Terrio has only ever written one good story, and it was based on real life.
I think JJ probably did want to make a meaningful movie. I think he absolutely wanted it to be great and amazing and to touch people the way The Force Awakens touched a lot of people. I think he simply doesn’t know how to do that. It’s not that he doesn’t want to. It’s just beyond him. And he’s gone out of his way to make sure that he doesn’t have to be in that position most of the time, and that’s benefitted him greatly in his career. His strength is in beginnings, and then stopping when the actual STORYTELLING parts begin to take on more and more importance. And I think maybe he thought with Star Wars he could finally disprove the idea that he doesn’t get why this stuff works, and that he could find substance in a story beyond mimicking what worked before.
The last movie in the Skywalker Saga is one hell of a way to have it irrefutably, irrevocably confirmed that he can’t, though.
For me, suggesting that he didn’t want to make something meaningful is letting him off the hook, because it suggests he COULD if he really tried. And at this point - I just don’t think he has it in him. I really don’t. It’s not a thing he’s built for. He can feint TOWARDS meaning and depth, and hopefully other collaborators can (and will) pick up the baton and take it where he’s pointing. But when you ask him to follow through himself… he can’t do it.
I really think that’s the big lesson here. It’s not a story about corporate interference, or meddling bosses.
It’s the story of a couple guys, under the gun and on the clock, delivering sub-par work because their instincts are inherently bad. That’s it.
Oh wow. How many times have I seen that movie and never EVER noticed that. That’s great.
I agree, there’s a ton of potential for this show and I’m excited to see how they build from what they did in season one.
Make a small-scale TV show that respects the canon
I don’t think “respecting the canon” has a whole lot to do with why it’s liked though. Not to any real degree. Nor should it be, honestly. Canon isn’t that important, ultimately. It’s just as malleable as any other story element. What’s important is whether or not you put some thought into why you’re breaking - or adhering - to it, and execute that thought well.
The Mandalorian comparison might also be alluding to how Mandalorian very obviously plays like a movie that got rewritten, split into parts, and had 3 bottle episodes shoved into the middle of it, and maybe they don’t want that to happen here, too.
But they could release it as a movie on Disney+ if they wanted, as well. It doesn’t have to be a “TV Show” - but I get why they’d rather have four weeks of subscription retention as opposed to one.
And… it’s delayed indefinitely. They’re worried the story Amini came up with is going to seem too similar to the Mandalorian’s, and they want to reduce the episode count from 6 to 4. Which makes me wonder why they even bothered turning it into a TV show. That’s basically movie length if they’re using Mandalorian-sized episodes.
I don’t think Carrie’s passing had much to do with it at all. I think Trevorrow couldn’t come up with a version of the story where he could redeem Kylo, and that’s what caused the split. None of his drafts have it, and the Jack Thorne draft that does have it… he probably didn’t want his name on that once he read it, because shortly after it came in, he was gone. Most of the other aspects of the two approaches share similarities (which is probably why Trevorrow got the credit he got, even if Abrams and Terrio really did page one rewrite it) but the only really big difference is Kylo.
I do believe the wedge issue was Lucasfilm execs believed this story needed to have the redemption of its bad guy, and the writer/director they initially hired to deliver that ending didn’t feel the same way. The guy they got to replace Trevorrow not only would do it, but he’d resurrect Carrie Fisher in order to get it done. Oh, and he ALSO directed the biggest domestic earner of all time, whereas the other guy just made Book of Henry.
That probably seemed like a pretty brilliant move in September 2017.
I’ve heard the 50 completed scripts thing too. If it’s true, it’s crazy it never got made, though I guess that’s how Lucas rolled. You almost have to think it’s a shame too? Unless it sucked of course. I wonder if they’d ever consider reviving the concept for D+, but I doubt it.
My bet is that they’ve basically been parting it out for whatever they need.
But yeah, if they ever need a quick hit of content for their streaming network, it’s got to be very tempting to know the development process on a full 5 season series is already finished. Literally all you have to do is start shooting it.
IIRC, Underworld had a Palpatine Origin Story episode that essentially made the case Palpatine only really sought out the Sith because he couldn’t handle getting done wrong by his girlfriend.
Ronald D. Moore talked about it some after everything got sold, and I think that interview he gave is where we found out the whole show had something like 50-plus completely finished scripts? Also that Moore and Lucas would get in full-on FIGHTS over the story direction. Not gentle disagreements, but very heated arguments about what “Star Wars” can be.
Which I thought was awesome. Make that dude fight for his story, not just sit there and dole it out. Make him do the work of justifying the ideas that fly into his head, as opposed to just handing them down to people like they’re historical documents.
I really wish that Coruscant uprising stuff had somehow made it through the development process. It looks so good.
IIRC, the version in the film and on the isolated score is slightly different than the one on the soundtrack. Someone matched the waveforms up and the iso score was different than the TLJ and TFA soundtracks (which were identical)
That last two paragraphs of mine that you just quoted are speaking directly to that, though. It’s a big part of Hamill’s performance, and why that performance is so good.
Wish they made it clear within the film itself that he didn’t really want the Jedi to end.
They did. He literally says it to Kylo at the close of their duel.
He’s angry and upset and he’s got an audience to vent to in Rey, so he’s trying to convince himself as much as he is trying to convince her that the last few years of his solitary life on this rock mean more than they actually do. His behaviors are saying just as much as any line of dialog would (and even then, he gets an actual line of dialog that makes it explicit later in the movie)
But it’s not an accident we see him carefully folding his Jedi robes, or that he’s still got a shrine with the Sacred Jedi Texts up and standing, or that he can’t make himself destroy the tree, and that he’s very upset at the possibility of Yoda having burned those books. All of those things are clear evidence that he’s not really dedicated to letting the Jedi end. He’s talking a good game but he hasn’t convinced himself, and every time push comes to shove he chooses to PROTECT the Jedi way, not destroy it. The very fact he chooses to train her at all speaks to the idea that he’s not convinced that it’s really “time for the Jedi to end.”
When did Rian Johnson say that? He’s obviously afraid - it’s in Hamill’s performance, it’s in Luke’s behavior, it’s definitely present in the moment where he talks a good game about burning down the tree and then doesn’t do it because he’s scared to.
Yes, he wants to stop the cycle, but he’s also scared to do it. And eventually he learns that his method of stopping the cycle is a bad one anyway, because while his intent was good, the way he went about it wasn’t.
He’s not “suddenly” on Ahch-To because of fear, it was always a part of why he went there. Fear, Shame, Anger, Sadness… all of that is mixed together in his motivations to cut himself off and stay cut off.
Him having Leia’s saber stashed away in there isn’t a “plot hole.”
Streaming has become so mainstream and prioritized that for many people, the option to watch, much less own, physical discs isn’t even really an option to them. The idea that there’s a big enough number of people who would buy physical releases of the show instead of streaming them doesn’t seem realistic to me, I agree. They wouldn’t lose money if they issued this series on blu-ray or 4K UHD.
For better or worse (largely worse if you care about things like picture quality) the mainstream audience considers streaming to be the primary home video format now, and prefer to watch their shows via the internet. The discs wouldn’t be competition with that. They’d be a very cool secondary income stream for the property though, and they should exploit that.
He also kept his Jedi robes. And when he went to go burn the tree - he couldn’t burn it. Yoda had to do it for him. Luke didn’t really want the Jedi to end, (“I will not be the last Jedi” are some of the last words he ever speaks") and he couldn’t make himself do it. That he kept Leia’s lightsaber as a memento isn’t a “plot hole” because it doesn’t undo or mess up anything from a plotting perspective, much less a thematic or character one. It’s absolutely in keeping with the Luke from The Last Jedi. Luke was being dishonest to both himself and Rey about why he was really on that island, and it wasn’t some big noble aspiration. He was depressed and scared and ashamed.
I didn’t ignore what you said concerning the fire range - the movie also establishes that the First Order probably could have, at any point, jumped ahead and just wiped them out, but Hux instead chose to just follow behind and essentially torture them instead of just getting it over with. He’s being sadistic and awful and enjoying it instead of putting in the work.
Which is ALSO a thematic element that keeps getting referenced and paid off later in the movie - the villains’ hubris and arrogance gets them ruined. Had Hux been as ruthless as he pretends he is, the movie would have ended after 30 minutes. Had Snoke been paying attention instead of feeling himself, he wouldn’t have gotten bisected. If Kylo had been paying attention instead of raging out on Crait, he would have figured out what was really going on before it was too late.
Here’s a larger point that I’m trying to make - aside from the fact these “plot holes” aren’t really plot holes at all, if your deconstruction of the story is being done solely to point out how there are ways to effectively end the story after 30 minutes because the bad guys “could have” done something else that they didn’t do and it would wipe out the good guys, then you’re not really worried about the story or the plot-holes, you’re basically trying to invalidate the movie, period. That’s not fixing a story, that’s anti-storytelling. That’s suggesting that our heroes need to be so pigeonholed BY the plot that the course of action they take is the only possible course of action they COULD take. That’s video-game routing, not large-scale movie storytelling. What’s the end goal of this criticism, and what is it that it’s saying about the story and the characters and the themes and ideas they represent?
The rate of cannon fire and the distance on that cannon fire isn’t important enough to invalidate whole themes and arcs, and suggesting the story needs to work that way in order to be successful doesn’t make any sense to me. Especially not in the face of how clearly the film DOES communicate all its ideas and details as they’re happening.
We’re not talking technicalities at all, though. Nothing I mentioned is a “technicality.”
And that “technicality” you are trying to mention in regards to a plot hole that isn’t, doesn’t address or even begin to engage with any of the larger thematic or character questions I brought up, either.
Poe basically led a charge, against orders, based on his own personal feeling, to destroy a big weapon that could be used against the Resistance, that got a bunch of valuable resources (and even more importantly, human lives) eradicated for little gain, and that gain was even more solidly dwarfed by the fact his “positive” outcome ended up not mattering because the second they dropped out of lightspeed a bigger, more deadly, more threatening ship greeted them. The dreadnought doesn’t matter in comparison to Snoke himself being on the scene - and that scenario gets paralleled at the end of the film on Crait to highlight the futility of pursuing that sort of “heroic” action without paying attention to what it really means in the larger scheme.
Again, that’s not a plot-hole. And where does “fixing” that “plot hole” even leave you in the context of that story and what it’s doing?
But nobody’s going to do that because their perspective is so minimized that “chilling” and busying themselves with almost anything else isn’t an option. So much of who they are and what they see themselves AS is wrapped up in… that.
So they can’t “chill” because there’s nothing in it for them (or at least they don’t see that yet, if they ever will).
The only exit is exhaustion, really. Eventually you gotta hope people get tired enough and through attrition, they just quit. And then it’s a question of whether or not we keep paying attention to that churn.
That’s not a plothole, and it doesn’t really have anything to do with the point I’m making regarding Finn’s suicide run.
Poe was reckless, and did endanger the fleet. Again, this is very clearly shown to us through visuals and dialog. He also reduced the number of threats that followed them through hyperspace, yes - but considering Snoke’s flagship showed up anyway, (a giant ship that literally dwarfed the dreadnought, and brought its own set of Star Destroyers with it) the idea that losing all those pilots and ships to destroy the one dreadnought was “worth it” in the way Poe thought it was is very clearly shown by the film to be not true.
But again: What happens to the story if that “plot hole” is patched up? What is that saying in the context of the larger story, and where is it pointing? If you’re “fixing” stuff without keeping any of that in mind, what are you actually “fixing?”
Poe’s arc is started by Paige’s sacrifice, and how that sacrifice wasn’t quite in vain, but was definitely unneccessary in the larger scheme. Having Poe be in charge of a similar situation on Crait, and recognizing his mistake this time, goes a long way towards resolving that arc later in the cave when Finn is, emotionally and character-wise, where Poe was.
And that’s how you wind up with Finn wanting to make Paige’s sacrifice, but this time even less effectively, with even more on the line, and being stopped by Paige’s sister from doing that so that both Finn and Poe can complete their character arcs in this story. That’s not a plot-hole.
Since when are Reylos racist? Apparently I’ve been misinformed because I always assumed they were pro-Disney.
assumptions != information, though, haha. (Also, not sure how the opposite of Racism is Disney. That doesn’t make any sense)
Again: Not all “Reylos” are racist. Not all “______________” are ever just one thing. It’s why phrases like “Not all men” became comedy cliches, because everyone understands “Not all ___________” is a truism - but that’s also not the point, because in many cases nobody’s really trying to say “all ____________ are ______” in a serious, thoughtful discussion.
But some Reylos, in defending their headcanon (a big problem with Reylo has always been their weird insistence on their headcanon being validated as actual canon, as if that would somehow make their ship better instead of lamer and less fun - which is exactly what happened) accidentally displayed and even promoted racist thoughts and POVs, specifically when it came to the ways they’d disqualify the possibilities that Rey might couple with either Finn or Poe.
Anyway, it’s just another branch on the very tribalistic and angry tree that is modern online fandom, the same rules more or less apply: Groups of people who have chosen to substitute their personalities with their fandom behave nonsensically and irrationally with each other, because the point of their presence in the fandom isn’t to like things, it’s to get mad at other people for not liking things the way they want them to. So some Reylos accidentally showed their racism, and some “anti-Reylos” made a meal out of that. Were some of those “antis” unfair and opportunistic and bad faith about it? Of course they were. Not many of the people involved are honestly trying to “do the right thing” they’re just trying to feel self-righteous and justified for a small moment in an otherwise unremarkable and substance-free day. So if they can get that “win” at the expense of a total stranger on the internet, they’re going to do it.