TFA: Inherited Force powers are unambiguously confirmed, doubly so considering Rey’s retcon.
The TFA novelization also strongly implied that Rey was able to “download” Kylo’s knowledge of the Force during his attempt to mind probe her. Or at least that it “awakened” her Force proficiency.
Tatooine, though materially insignificant, is “sacred” within the Force.
Anakin’s last thoughts as he smiled at Luke were of how much Luke reminded him of Padme.
Each version of the OT exists in an alternate timeline from each other. The theatrical versions are in their own canon, with any pre-1997 EU content optionally included. The 2004 and 2011 versions exist in the same canon as the prequels and all of the EU. The 2019 versions are in the Disney canon.
They did not want to rehash Star Wars, or Luke would have been physically on Crait and would have let Kylo strike him down so Leia and the rebels could escape the way Obi Wan let Vader cut him down on the death star.
It was a bit too late for that if they were worried about rehashing. The first half of the throne room scene was borderline plagiarism already, and the battle of Crait was very Hothlike. I have heard people point out the Luke-Yoda and the island-Dagobah parallels before. TLJ is quite derivative, and the most original portions of the movie (Canto Bight, the mutiny subplot) are generally considered to be the worst parts of the movie.
In the version I wrote above, Luke doesn’t let himself get cut down. He’s trying to stay in the fight as long as possible to protect his allies and give them time to escape. And the whole time, he’s trying to reach out to Ben, as Luke would.
They sort of did it but with Luke as a force projection instead so Rian could say it was original. And so Broom boy got his legend.
That’s the part that doesn’t make sense, though. How would Broom Boy, or anyone else in the galaxy outside of the First Order military or the handful of people aboard the Falcon, even know about what Luke did? How would the legend spread?
The question is, what would you have preferred? Because simply removing the astral projection from the scene, having it be a simple action scene played absolutely straight, not only would it create a ton of problems, but it’s the exact kind of thing I’d expect from a hypothetical version of the sequel trilogy that was actually nothing but a lazy cash grab, no creative energy involved.
With all the rest of TLJ remaining the same, and the leadup to Luke’s appearance being the same, here’s what I would have done.
Imagine Luke did come there in person. Kylo insists on killing him personally, and orders that the First Order broadcast the fight on the Holonet, so that the whole galaxy can witness the death of Luke Skywalker. Maybe we even have shots of crowds watching holograms of the battle: on Coruscant, on Canto Bight (broom boy would be watching), on Naboo, etc. Kylo wants the whole galaxy to see as its last hope is snuffed out. Luke earnestly tries to talk him down and convince him to turn away from this path, and apologizes profusely for his actions towards Ben. It would be made clear that Luke still cares about him and sees the good in him. Kylo furiously lashes out, despite Luke’s best efforts, and the two have a physical duel. Show how much stronger Kylo has become since he is much less conflicted than before. His anger and hatred have become focused, and he is finally a force to be reckoned with on par with Vader. Luke puts up a valiant fight, but Kylo overpowers him, and wounds him severely, then again, and again.
All the while, the Resistance are making their escape, with Rey frantically trying to throw the rocks from the cave entrance one by one. The process of lifting each rock would be visibly taxing for her, and there would be a sense of a race against time as it could cut back and forth between her struggle to open the way and Luke’s battle with Kylo. Every time it seems that Luke is about to fall over in defeat, he gathers himself back up and stands defiantly, determined to buy the Resistance as much time as possible, and Kylo is getting angrier and more unhinged. Show how the Holonet broadcast is starting to have the opposite of its intended effect on the people of the galaxy. People are rallying behind Luke. They’re cheering him on and loudly encouraging him to keep fighting. Then, when Kylo finally strikes Luke down, and Kylo angrily flaunts his triumph over the martyred last Jedi, the galaxy watches in stunned silence and grief (maybe have Qui-Gon’s funeral theme playing). And that grief begins to stir inside of people, until it erupts in galaxy-wide revolution by Episode IX.
That would’ve messed me up emotionally. Maybe some people would consider this ending to be played too straight, but Star Wars is a melodrama at its core. It’s a simple story, but compelling in its simplicity and earnestness.
Mace Windu’s poop is purple.
Instead of using magic to vanish the poop away, they just use the Force to “cast” it as a projectile attack against their enemies.
I don’t have a huge problem with Midichlorians. They essentially exist to act as a middleman between life forms and the Force, and to explain the differences in Force potential between different people. My issue with them is that adding this new microscopic middleman to explain how people connect to the Force really just passes the question onto something else rather than clarifying anything. Midichlorians are life forms that live inside other life forms, yet only Midichlorians are able to connect to the Force directly without needing an intervening entity to help them. Which raises the question: what is actually special about Midichlorians? If they’re just physical organisms, what sets them apart? What is it about them that makes them unique and justifies their special connection to the Force that no other life forms have? Where before, the connection between people and the Force was left mysterious and sparsely explained, now we know people connect through the Midichlorians, yet the connection between Midichlorians and the Force itself is unexplained.
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.
Called it in the inb4!
What? Look, I don’t want to go through the motions of this argument again, so here’s a flowchart that debunks the whole “Jedi are pacifists” thing, which really is just an invention of Rian Johnson’s imagination.
Jedi don’t initiate violence, but defending the most vulnerable often means actually using that laser sword on your belt.
The PT has massive amounts of worldbuilding. The sheer volume of worlds, species, factions, and cultures introduced
Like what? Like who? The closest thing we get to that I can think of is that they have some new alien designs, but that’s art design again, not worldbuilding.
in the PT provided so much fertile ground for new stories to tell and history to flesh out.
The EU picking up the slack for the PT does not make the PT good. The EU doing worldbuilding does not mean the PT had any, in fact it just highlights the sheer lack of worldbuilding in the PT.
We finally got to see the Republic
We get to see the Republic is a really shallow ripoff of the United States government made by someone whose understanding of the US government clearly didn’t go beyond, like, 7th grade civics class. We don’t know anything about how it functions other than that the Chancellor is the leader of the executive and that the Senate has some legislative authority, and there is a third branch that is never relevant, despite us being told it’s supposed to be in, like, 2 lines?
Compare, like, literally any other fantasy Republic, or even any other fantasy government. There’s so much more interesting nuance that could be here, but is ditched for a really shallow-ass allegory about how Bush did 9/11 or some shit.
Maybe it could be said that spending too much time on the functionality of the Republic would be a bad idea and detract from the story. I’d probably agree. But that’s a justification for the prequels’ lack of worldbuilding, the fact of the matter is that there is a lack of worldbuilding, and the little bit that is there is downright uncreative.
We got to see the different corporations that formed the CIS.
Aside from the Trade Federation, we get name drops for the different corporations that formed the CIS. That’s it.
You don’t even have to leave Star Wars to see this done right, compare the depth the CIS gets in the EU and TCW to the complete lack thereof in the prequels.
Even the Trade Federation is literally just the GOP. They’re not even trying to hide it. Nute Gingrich + Ronald Raygun = Nute Gunray. While I hate the Republican Party, the Trade Federation as a criticism has the depth of tin foil. We don’t know anything about their beliefs, private or public, we don’t know anything about why their policies are bad, we just know that they’re evil and greedy and mean and they’re in league with George Walker Hitler.
As an instance of worldbuilding, they have even less depth than tin foil.
The fall of the Republic is not a straight allegory, least of all for the Bush administration or 9/11, though it was accused of being one. You’re just dismissing all the political worldbuilding by saying it’s ripped straight from real life, when it’s simply inspired by real world history, like any other worldbuilding. The Trade Federation is not the GOP. If anything, they have much more in common with groups like the East India Company. The prequels wouldn’t have been able to go into exhaustive detail about the motivations and ideologies of every faction in the Republic, since these are still ultimately movies meant to be watched by kids. You can argue that they should have spelled out some of these details better, and that the worldbuilding lacked depth, but it’s clear that there are many conflicting factions and ideologies at play in this galaxy, so you can’t say that the world lacks breadth.
We see how the corruption in the well-meaning Republic paved the way for Palpatine’s rise to power. The steps are there, plainly visible. The state of the galaxy is established (something the sequels seem deliberately vague on), and the galaxy as a whole feels expansive and diverse, rather than just a series of action movie sets. We finally get a sense of a full-scale war being fought among many different worlds, with different species on opposite sides of it. I wish we had gotten more of that, but what we did get was quite vast, if shallow.
The prequels actually added something significant to the story.
I really have to disagree hard on this. The Last Jedi feels like an actual contribution to Star Wars. It developed on interesting characters introduced in TFA, and gave Luke a character arc I was interested in. It contributed to the Star Wars mythos, and I kind of think you have to ignore the whole movie to say there wasn’t a lot of passion and care put into this movie or that it didn’t add anything significant to the story.
I’d say the opposite. You’d have to ignore large portions of the movie to claim that it was a product of love and care for the mythos. The film goes out of its way to debase and trivialize what came before. It repeatedly trips over its own messages (i.e. the message about whether self-sacrifice to defeat an enemy is good or bad). And it’s filled with so much bloat that’s not deep or cerebral in the slightest and drags the movie down from whatever lofty heights it was aiming for.
But a lot of criticisms made against the ST seem to be because they weren’t totally vapid. Especially ones having to do with Luke Skywalker.
There is a massive middle ground between “pathetic hobo Luke” and “invincible Force god Luke.” Luke in the OT was a great character not because of his power, but because of his kindness and compassion. He was the right person to restart the Jedi Order because of his wisdom and moral quality. TLJ doesn’t make Luke more interesting. It just removes all of Luke’s personality traits and surgically transfers them to Rey.
I don’t think the prequels were a straight cash grab, because it looks like there was actual effort put into the Phantom Menace. But overall we have:
-One movie with an actual story, but none of the events of this movie really end up being all that relevant, and it’s not even like this story is all that complex
-One movie that feels like it’s trying to be the setup to a new trilogy, but doesn’t have much of an interesting story of its own, and, you know, it’s actually Episode 2, and should be starting to wrap the story up.
-One movie that starts off by dropping all the setup done in the previous movie, farting around on Coruscant telling us exposition for over an hour, then acts out backstory we already knew from the OT (really inaccurately I might add), then goes on an ANH fanservice montage it didn’t earn or justify
Actually, we know behind the scenes that they kinda hard pressed the reset button after TPM, which is why pretty much nothing in TPM is relevant. I wonder if they also did that between AotC and RotS, although more of a soft press this time. Every single movie feels like the first movie in a prequel trilogy, but (believe it or not), they’re not all the first movie. So when the end of Revenge of the Sith rolls around, it feels like the story of an entire trilogy is crammed into the last 40ish minutes of the movie, and a ton of that time is devoted to overly long SFX sequences, not the actual story.
I’ll agree with you that the gap between TPM and AotC feels like a soft reset, but that can be largely attributed to the large time gap that was necessary in order to age up Anakin. AotC and RotS, on the other hand, actually are fairly well connected and feel mostly like a continuing story (with a missing middle film about the Clone Wars, which is what Episode II should have been). I disagree with this idea that RotS was any kind of reset. It had to cram a lot of plot in two hours, but it certainly doesn’t feel like the first film in a trilogy.
As for context to the OT characters, it’s so incredibly unclear that it doesn’t even really seem to matter. Mainly, Anakin’s reason for becoming Vader changed behind the scenes for all three movies, and even the final movie where it’s supposed to happen can’t seem to make up its mind on why.
No, it didn’t. Anakin’s reason for turning was already being set up in TPM.
“Afraid to lose her, hm? Fear is the path to the Dark Side. Fear leads to anger…”
Anakin was especially vulnerable to the Dark Side because of his attachments, to his mother and to Padme, and his fear of losing those he loved. That was always intended to be the primary reason for his fall.
“I will be the most powerful Jedi ever. I will even learn to stop people from dying.”
“Fear of loss is a path to the Dark Side…Attachment leads to jealousy…Train yourself to let go of everything you fear to lose.”
You can argue it was sloppy, but the work George put in is all there. It was being built up to throughout the trilogy. George knew from the beginning how Anakin was going to fall. There was no mind-changing behind the scenes. It was definitely planned.
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.
I don’t think TLJ contradicts TFA on Finn’s arc or on the political situation.
It’s not so much that TLJ contradicts Finn’s TFA arc. It’s that Finn’s arc and treatment in TLJ is insulting and patronizing. Finn had been abducted and brainwashed since he was a toddler to kill for an authoritarian regime. Then, whether through the Force or through his own conscience, he rejected his lifelong programming and broke free. He was frightened, confused, and traumatized. He had never been out in the real world on his own. He went out of his way to protect Rey, a stranger he came to care about when there was essentially no one else in his life. Both Finn and Rey have scenes on Takodana where they run away from fear, yet only Finn is ever called out on it or made to look bad from it. Some people claim that Finn was selfish in the third act because he only went on the Starkiller Base mission to find Rey. But Finn owes the Resistance nothing. Finn has every right to want to be left alone and get away from the people who brainwashed and oppressed him. After TLJ, many people retroactively viewed Finn’s actions in TFA as those of a cowardly, selfish man, because that’s how TLJ framed him at the start. (Then there was that Lucasfilm story group member on Twitter who had a weird animosity toward Finn, and used to constantly tweet about how Finn was a coward who needed to be taught a lesson in TLJ). But Finn standing up to Kylo, a man who symbolized Finn’s lifelong oppression, was a moment of great personal significance and heroism for Finn. But it never gets brought up again. Ever.
Both Finn and Kylo get seriously injured at the end of TFA. Only Kylo’s injury is treated seriously and used to try to make the audience sympathize with him. Finn’s is glossed over, and his awakening is played for laughs. Finn then gets admonished for trying to leave to protect Rey, even though it is well within his rights to do so. He is not obligated to stay with the Resistance. Then he goes to Canto Bight, where he gets lectured about child slavery and war profiteering, despite being a child soldier, and then he doesn’t even help the slave children who are stuck there. There’s no sense of recognition he feels towards them, when there ought to be. And he leaves them behind to be punished for letting the Fathiers escape.
Then he gets lectured by DJ about how there are no truly good or evil factions in the galaxy and how none of the fighting matters. And Finn actually seems surprised and considering of this idea. When he should absolutely know from experience how horrific the First Order is, given what they did to him, and would fiercely reject what DJ is saying. Only one faction kidnaps children as soldiers, and the other faction only exists to try to stop them.
The whole of TLJ treats Finn like he’s a selfish child who needs to be taught a lesson about the world and about committing to a cause. There were so many directions they could have taken his story after TFA. Force sensitivity. Leading a Stormtrooper rebellion. Going on an actual personal journey of self discovery that isn’t just him learning that the Resistance is good.
The Last Jedi is far more deserving of the “Good story, bad execution” title than the prequels. The Last Jedi has a compelling story about the legacy of the people and events of the Star Wars Trilogy, which is unfortunately undermined by bathos too much, but it’s still there.
The Force Awakens, I think it’s the weaker of the two, but because it doesn’t really have as much substance as the Last Jedi. Maybe that’s “Meh to okay story, good execution”. Maybe we can fault it for that, but the first movie in the other two trilogies were a lot less complex than the latter two movies, and they were both probably for the better for that. It was an enjoyable movie and the Last Jedi picked up the slack for it.
TFA isn’t merely a simple story. It’s a hollow story. It was JJ who pushed the script in the direction of being a soft reboot, and I’m pretty he’s the reason we never got to see a functioning New Republic or New Jedi order in these films. There were countless stories that could have been told post-RotJ that could have honored the original story and appealed to nostalgia while still telling something new and interesting. This notion that the film had to be a soft reboot in order to “remind people of how great Star Wars” is entirely false. You can use nostalgic imagery within a new, original story. You don’t need to copy the story beats as well. And in doing that reboot, TFA entirely undid the OT. The heroes of the OT lived long enough to watch everything they had fought for come crumbling down around them, not just partially, but in its entirety. The New Republic was a spineless failed state. None of what they accomplished survived. And their lives post-RotJ were miserable and fraught with failure. The EU for the new Disney canon had to contort itself and create a depressing new timeline just in order to make the plot of TFA happen.
TFA is one of the most corporate, shallow, manipulative movies I’ve ever seen in my life. The only aspect of the story that interested me in the slightest was Finn, and maybe Kylo. Everything else felt like a cardboard cutout of the OT, or a Hollywood product wearing the dead skin of a Star Wars movie. It was obnoxious and had nothing to offer while teasing the audience with future mysteries in a cheap ploy to drum up excitement for future films. It had no substance. It was a hype tool.
TLJ was slightly better in terms of artistic integrity, but was less polished. The film was a bloated mess that attempted some profound metacommentary that would challenge the themes and ideas of the saga, yet failed to fully understand what it was critiquing. The film misinterprets basic concepts of the Jedi and the Force, like not understand what “Balance of the Force” means, or acting like the Jedi are meant to be pacifists. The worldbuilding was barely existent, and by the end of the film, the galaxy had never felt smaller. The ending, which was supposed to feel inspiring and uplifting, instead felt empty and depressing.
Speaking of which, one cool thing about 7 and 8 that was missing for 9 was the metanarrative about the IRL legacy of the OT told through the in-universe legacy of the OT. Pretty much everything interesting about 7 and 8 was dropped for 9.
That’s largely why the sequel trilogy doesn’t work. It’s far too concerned with metanarrative that takes you out of the saga instead of just being about the characters and continuing the story in a logical direction. The characters of the OT are not their actors. The real-world history of the Star Wars franchise is not the history of the galaxy. The films are more about Star Wars, either paying tribute to it or challenging/subverting it, rather than just being Star Wars films.
The Rise of Skywalker is the one that’s rotten to the core, fundamentally broken, but that’s its own fault. The first two sequel movies were coherent, and gave ample opportunity for 9 to be as cohesive, but that’s where they dropped the ball.
I cannot imagine any alternate reality where TFA and TLJ both exist and Episode IX was good. The story had run into a dead end. The universe was shrunken. The end of TLJ feels oddly upbeat, as though we should be excited for the supposed new world of possibilities that await our heroes. But that’s not what we saw in the movie. We saw a film that was catastrophic for our heroes, and should have ended with them in mourning for all they’ve lost, and for the tragic fate of the galaxy falling into the hands of a madman. TLJ was a Pyrrhic victory for the First Order, but still a victory nonetheless. They had essentially obliterated the Resistance as a faction. Kylo couldn’t carry the film as a main antagonist, though. Not after having been humiliated over the course of the two films. Palpatine was brought back out of desperation, because JJ was aware of that fact. TLJ doesn’t work either as a second film in a trilogy, or as a penultimate film in a nine-part saga.
If there was ever a sequel trilogy to Lord of the Rings
I don’t think the Star Wars Trilogy and Lord of the Rings are really comparable in this regard. The story of LotR is the culmination of history itself in-universe, but the Star Wars Trilogy feels relatively self-contained. The nature of sequels to either of them would be very different.
I don’t think they’re as different as you believe. Tolkien actually did start writing a sequel to LotR, then scrapped the idea when he realized it was a dead end and would only undermine what he had already written, and be quite depressing.
“I did begin a story placed about 100 years after the Downfall, but it proved both sinister and depressing. Since we are dealing with Men it is inevitable that we should be concerned with the most regrettable feature of their nature: their quick satiety with good. So that the people of Gondor in times of peace, justice and prosperity, would become discontented and restless — while the dynasts descended from Aragorn would become just kings and governors — like Denethor or worse. I found that even so early there was an outcrop of revolutionary plots, about a centre of secret Satanistic religion; while Gondorian boys were playing at being Orcs and going around doing damage. I could have written a ‘thriller’ about the plot and its discovery and overthrow — but it would have been just that. Not worth doing.”
The Original Trilogy was a fairly traditional fantasy tale with a happy ending. Any sequel trilogy released later could never be viewed in isolation from the Originals, especially if it included the same characters, since it would fundamentally alter that original story in a much bleaker, more cynical direction. The three trilogies can’t be fully divorced from each other, as much as I would like for them to be. It’s a continuously running story from Phantom Menace to Rise of Skywalker. The creative choices made in the sequels have consequences for all the prior films. They recontextualize their events and characters and how people perceive them. That’s not something that writers should consider lightly.
Eh, JJ doing 7 and Rian doing 8 was fine. JJ continued to work on 8 and Rian was involved with 7, so it’s not like there was a hard reset between each movie like some people think for some reason.
There are several discrepancies between TFA and TLJ. And JJ had little to no creative input on TLJ (though Rian had some input on TFA).
At the end of TFA, Finn is severely wounded by a slash to the spine that puts him in a coma as a result of standing alone against a dark lord to protect his friend. In TLJ, he wakes up comically, his body completely fine, then is portrayed as a selfish coward in the following scene. He is then demoted from lead character to side character sent on a filler quest.
In TFA, the First Order is a fringe faction launching a surprise invasion of the galaxy. In TLJ, despite having just lost their most important weapon, they are abruptly put into the position of “established galactic government,” essentially making them the Empire again. (TRoS then nerfs them in order to make Palpatine’s fleet seem to matter.)
In TFA, Hux is a serious, calculating, but passionate military leader. In TLJ, he’s a clown.
In TFA, Snoke is portrayed as mysterious and imposing, someone commanding from the shadows, and the film ends with him resolving to complete Kylo Ren’s training. In TLJ, we see him in person with no real fanfare, and he looks like a cartoon villain in a golden bathrobe, who pettily mocks Kylo for his failure. He later orders Kylo to kill Rey while she is being held down and defenseless as a completion of his training, despite him just killing his father, which would have been much more difficult and significant for him.
Luke is shown in Jedi robes, then immediately changes out of them in TLJ.
Rey’s backstory is built up as a mystery, then cast aside as unimportant. (I admit it’s possible that “Rey Nobody” was always meant to be a misdirect to save the true parent reveal for Episode IX. But I can’t say for sure.)
And TLJ ends in a way that essentially felt like an epilogue. So many plot threads were cut off that Episode IX was bound to feel like a reset and be disconnected from the first two films. It also doesn’t help that neither Kylo nor Hux was a strong enough villain to serve as the main antagonist in the final film (and Lucasfilm seemed set on making Reylo happen, so Kylo had to be redeemed somehow, anyway).
The sequel trilogy could’ve been made more cohesive if there was one central vision behind it, but after the prequels I don’t think that would’ve been a good idea. Better to keep it as a group project, but, you know, not toss out the most important third of your trilogy.
I don’t think we should cast away the whole idea of a central vision just because George botched the prequels. The main issues with the prequels lie more in their execution (dialogue, acting, tone, character personalities, special effects). But the overarching story of the prequels has good bones. The issues with the sequel trilogy are on a much more fundamental level. The overarching story of the sequels was broken and built on a faulty foundation from the start. The sequels mostly nailed the more surface-level aspects of filmmaking that the prequels failed at, but that’s not enough to redeem a story that fundamentally doesn’t work. A clear vision of how to continue the story post-RotJ was desperately needed. You can’t make sequels to some of the most revered, classic films of all time by just “winging it.” If there was ever a sequel trilogy to Lord of the Rings written in a similar manner as these films were, they would be despised with good reason.
I hope Harmy is aware of this, since he’s using the 2019 version as one of his main sources for Despecialized 3.0. I’m sure he’s already accounted for it in some way, though.
I brought it up in his thread. He did not seem inclined to uncrop anything unless it was really egregious, simply because what would be required to blend a 4K80 (or whatever) border around a 19SE frame would be prohibitively difficult & time-consuming for more than a few shots.
That said, I intend to keep tabs on this to ensure that the scene where Leia’s cropped out of a scene where she’s speaking should be considered egregious enough to be worth that effort, even if none of the others are.
That’s a shame. There’s really no straightforward solution to this.
Either JJ should have written and directed all 3 or Rian should have.
How about neither.
There’s an idea. Get Gareth Edwards to direct and get…someone competent…to write the whole trilogy. But I do believe that a full JJ trilogy or a full Rian trilogy would have been preferable to what we got.
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.
What would you say is the minimum level of hardware needed for the six track mix to be really worthwhile? Do you need a proper 5.1 surround system to have the quality difference be really noticeable? What about headphones that can use virtual surround?
My personal favorite audio is probably the 1993 mix. It’s not the purest version, but it combines the elements of the original mixes in a way that I consider the most appealing, and the added effects are acceptable. The 93 and 97 mixes are the ones I grew up with, so 93 is my personal go-to if I’m watching pre-Special Edition (as usual).
Since I always watch the trilogy with either headphones or a soundbar, I’d choose the 35mm stereo mix. If you’re watching with just your TV’s internal speakers, the difference between the stereo and surround wouldn’t be very noticeable, so you can pick either one. The six-track audio is ideal, but without a surround system, it just downmixes the audio and isn’t any better than the stereo track. As for any content differences, the stereo and surround are basically the same. Only the channel mixing is different.
Yub Nub is fantastic. I loved it when I was 10 and I love it now. It’s a feel good song for a feel good moment in the movie, and I get it stuck in my head. I think I think the new song sucks, but I’m not sure because I can’t even remember it.
That makes sense, because the new song isn’t very memorable. It’s pleasant sounding background music, but it’s no earworm.
If Star Wars is ever going to recapture the magic that originally inspired it, it will need to return to its mythological, Campbellian roots. Original Star Wars was an imitation of mythical tropes. Modern Star Wars is an imitation of that imitation. That’s what I meant earlier when I said the essence of Star Wars had become diluted. The creatives at Lucasfilm should revisit the source material that Star Wars was derived from and work from there. The themes and archetypes of the OT have their basis across many cultures and thousands of years of history and myth. Those archetypes and structures exist for a reason, and you shouldn’t attempt to deconstruct them unless you’re very knowledgeable and very certain of what you’re trying to do.
The prequel trilogy should have started with Anakin already an adult Jedi. That way, the story could be an inversion of Luke’s story. Luke would rise from humble beginnings to knighthood while Anakin would fall from knighthood into his degraded state as Vader.
George’s sequel trilogy, if it had ever been made, would likely have been bad. Just a different kind of bad from what we ultimately got.
The plot of Rogue One feels too important to the overall story to be just an anthology film. It’s not really a side story at all. It almost deserves its own episode number, but at the same time, it messes with A New Hope’s “in medias res” opening, which bugs me.
Man, Wingreen was so menacing as Fett. Hearing “He’s no good to me dead.” in that growly voice through my TV speaker is awesome.
One issue I have with Boba in The Mandalorian is he’s too helpful and selfless. He doesn’t have the same ruthless energy he had in Empire. That could be chalked up to his traumatic experience in the Sarlacc, but he seems too nice, in my opinion.
Bossk is clearly the cooler bounty hunter, since he looks like Godzilla in a space suit. He’s up there with Max Rebo as my favorite alien extra in Star Wars.
I think Star Wars is the best by a hair, Empire is better in a lot of ways just not as fun. Return is the weakest and uneven but still has its moments.
To me all three films, i mean the real versions are one piece. They tell a complete story i find it hard to consider them separately. Although i know Leia was never intended to be the sister, or Vader Luke’s father. The story of the original film when viewed as a standalone thing is very different from what came later. Star Wars itself not the SAGA is a different beast. A simple happy go lucky comic book movie, not some grand Epic.
A movie serial like Buck Rogers or Flash Gordon. Tells a simple story and is self contained.
Yeah, I’d say I’m in the same camp. When a trilogy is coming out, you’re regarding each film individually. But once the trilogy is complete and has been out for a while, and the trilogy’s story is really tightly knit like Star Wars is, you start to almost view the trilogy as a single, three-part movie. I do agree, though, that out of all the Star Wars movies, the original is still the one that can most stand on its own. If Star Wars had flopped and we never got another movie, it would still be regarded as a great singular classic film.
But Empire and Jedi together re-contextualize the first film and make it part of something grander and deeper. Empire and Jedi feel much more like a two-parter, and are more dependent on each other while the first film can stand alone. But together, all the films follow a very clear three-act structure, and I grew up knowing them as “the Star Wars trilogy,” so I can’t really divorce them from each other.
The prequels always felt separate from the OT, even when I was a kid, but still closely linked with each other (though TPM doesn’t quite carry its weight as a first act like ANH did). As soon as the PT was complete, it was something you could compartmentalize as a different story from the OT. It was a new three-part movie, not the first half of a six-part mega-movie like George wanted it to be. The same applies to the ST now that it’s finished. Discussion of the individual films slowly gives way to discussion of the films as a unit. Each trilogy has its own three acts, but the trilogies don’t really form a three-act structure together.
I enjoy both endings. Yub Nub is a great ending to the trilogy as a whole. The Victory Celebration is a great whole saga piece, I prefer the 97’ cut. Victory but with Sabastian Shaw.
A version with the new song, no montage, and Sebastian Shaw would be an acceptable compromise for me.
Enjoy
Wow, it’s like ASMR.
I enjoy both endings. Yub Nub is a great ending to the trilogy as a whole. The Victory Celebration is a great whole saga piece, I prefer the 97’ cut. Victory but with Sabastian Shaw.
A version with the new song, no montage, and Sebastian Shaw would be an acceptable compromise for me.
I’m glad you’re incorporating Moffs into your prequel era in a way that gradually transitions to their role in the OT. Tarkin really should have had a role in the PT beyond a cameo. Someone that important in the Imperial hierarchy, who was basically the main villain of the first movie, really deserves at least some setup.
I feel like a lot of people THINK they like TFA, but really they just like it cause it did just barely enough to be passable, while also avoiding anything inevitable that it knew would piss people off, thus putting all the burden onto Episode 8.
JJ Abrams is very much a people pleaser. He sets up plot points and mysteries that win over people’s initial interest, while deliberately ignoring or glossing over the less popular implications of those plot points. He’s not a great long term planner, but he’s very good at getting people excited.
