yotsuya said:
mfastx said:
DrDre said:
I agree. The PT ends where the OT begins, right down to the twin sunset on Tatooine. Going from ROTJ to TFA is far more jarring to me, where an obvious total victory is suddenly and without explanation completely reversed, while all the victors have become shadows of their former selves. General Solo has again become a smuggler in debt with everyone, who hides from his problems. Luke’s hiding from his problems on a rock, and has closed himself off from the Force. Even Leia has been demoted from princess, and senator to the general of an even smaller band of rebels, whilst Han and Leia have apparently won the worst parents of the year award.
This is my main issue with the ST. Despite the fact that they’re very good films, the story is just so nonsensical to me. What we’re told happened between VI and VII is far more interesting to me than what’s happening in VII and VIII. We’re right back where we started in the OT (if not worse, the rebels are down to a handful of folk on the falcon), with no real explanation as to how we got there after the triumphant victory in VI.
I would have much more enjoyed a story of how Ben got seduced by Snoke, how the First Order came to be, etc.
Many who don’t like it see things back where the OT began, but it isn’t. That is my point. While there are echoes of the OT in the ST (there were in the PT as well), the ST is telling a unique story that I don’t think we will totally see until the third story is out for us to follow the plots. In TLJ, the First Order has not yet taken over. Rey says it directly. While the Republic government and fleet have been wiped out, the First Order still has to actually seize power. They have only eliminated the other power that Snoke thought could stop him. We are no in the same place at the end of TLJ that we were at the beginning of ANH. It is a must different landscape. For one thing, there were no Jedi on the Galactic stage in ANH. There is Luke and Rey in TLJ and Luke has just left a lasting impression to give power to the new rebellion. Please find that in the years leading up to ANH. Even Rebels doesn’t have such a public display of power, and definitely not one that spread like wildfire across the galaxy.
The problem with saying that the First Order hasn’t technically won yet is that we’ve seen almost nothing of the Republic’s power in these new films, and what little we’ve seen of their planets shows them being filled with First Order sympathizers or in the process of being destroyed, or both. In the OT and the PT we are constantly shown the relative power of each side of the conflict, but as far as the visual storytelling of the ST so far, the Republic is no more.
And everyone keeps talking about Luke’s ‘public display of power’, but he didn’t defeat the First Order’s forces, or even defeat Kylo Ren. He just delayed them a little while at the cost of his life, and who would have seen this display of power? The remnants of the Resistance were running for their lives. Luke blowing up the Death Star surely had a bigger public impact than that. And now that you bring it up, I remember that Rebels did have a bigger public display of the power of the Force in the series finale, with the entire capital city of a planet watching in fear of their lives.
The mere existence of the Resistance and Leia’s role as its leader tells us that the new Republic is not what she had hoped and that she fears they do not take the First Order seriously. It paints a picture of a complacent Republic that is probably more worried about internal squabbles than a theoretical outside threat. That they had so few ships that the entire fleet was in orbit of the capital shows that it it was a very weak republic.
And I’ve seen several comments about continuing the OT the way George would do it, and guess what, they are. The basic plot elements, some of the very ones people are complaining the most about, were penned by George. They created their own cast of characters, but the broad arc of the trilogy seems to be following George’s treatment. Luke’s exile is the single item we can point to with absolutely certainty as coming directly from George himself, but the broad arcs fit with that. As does Luke now being the mentor as Ben was in the OT. The fact that George had an idea for a sequel and that it went so far as a treatment means he had conflict. It means he is the one who decided to derail the happy ending many imagine for post ROTJ. He seems to have given them a decade or two before ruining things for them Han and Leia have a son, there is a new Republic, but you can’t have the next chapter of a saga if things are all still rosy.
I seriously don’t get what some of you want. Do you want a sequel trilogy with a story or a pointless story set in a perfect Utopia? To get a story you have to have conflict and the easiest way to get it is for things to go wrong. In the ST we are getting, things went wrong about 15-20 years after ROTJ (and ROTJ wasn’t the last battle). That is 15-20 years when things went right. The Republic was flourishing and Han and Leia were together. And the worst part is you are blaming Kennedy, and Johnson and leaving out Lucas and Abrams. This whole ST is Lucas’s doing. He created a treatment, he sold his company, he turned it over to Kennedy. How much of his treatment they are using is unknown, but they are using his girl force sensitive hero and his exiled Luke and I bet there is a lot more they are using. But let’s sit tight and wait for IX before we write off the ST. We can’t even tell what the main story is, just like the redemption of Anakin/Vader didn’t become part of the story until ROTJ. In the PT, we all knew where it would end up so we knew the arc from the moment we heard the name Anakin.
We knew from Episode 1 that the galactic conflict was going to be Sith versus Republic.
We knew from Episode 4 that the conflict was going to be Rebellion versus Empire.
We should know from Episode 7 that the conflict is Resistance (made of Rebellion forces) versus First Order (made of Imperial forces).
For a sequel trilogy, they could easily have treated the war as if it never really ended. Our heroes from the last movie have been fighting for a new Republic for decades and have grown weary of the battles, and realize that their vision of a Republic and Jedi Order restored must fall to a new generation. You could even have the same backstory for the ST, with a First Order which has gained power in the Senate with the disappearance of the Jedi. Heck, even keep Luke’s cynical turn in questioning the Jedi religion. It would have similarities to the PT, but this time there’s no Snoke and no Starkiller Base, no sinister Sith to pull the strings, only a fight for the soul of the Jedi and what it truly means to bring peace and justice to the galaxy.