In my opinion, Kylo Ren is a problem for the entire ST. Can he be redeemed? Yes. The problem is, he's a radicalized alt right member that fell into that life through privilege, not hardship. We have real world examples of former white supremacists that are making amends for their time in the dark. But those amends don't include blowing up the correct spaceship or cutting your old recruiter in half. They include speaking engagements at high schools and mentoring at risk kids. There is a story to tell about guys like this, but I think it was a big mistake to center your swashbuckler tale around them. He needed to stay bad or be completely different. Speaking for myself, I completely rejected him in TFA. He was already beyond my boundary. TLJ confirmed that his "fall" was due to his uncle seeing his shit posts and anti Semitic memes and rejecting him. There is no action/adventure solution to this. He's just another spoiled rich white man that went bad.
Besides which, it's been nearly 40 years since Vader, dying a noble death to avoid your due doesn't float the same way it used to. Oh, and the idea that Rey would be attracted to him makes my skin crawl and fills me with rage.
Honestly, this is all a consequence of the empire being considered "cool" for a while now, because the caricature evil they were in the original movies didn't sufficiently carry over the horror of the fascist regime it was, so people filled out the blanks with other stuff.
Nuanced is good. But nuanced doesn't mean "trivialize evil".
Meanwhile, I've seen pretty much the opposite take: he's a kid that was groomed and abused. He doesn't need a redemption arc, he shouldn't be blamed for what was done to him and have to prove himself; he needs deprogramming, therapy, and support.
Personally, I submit that both real-world takes are a bad fit to a setting and writers that aren't interested and/or capable of telling either of those stories.
I suspect it's less "this is what I intended to say in the film" and more "I'm not going to shit the bed here by saying something that contradicts what the people making Ep9 might be doing".
I doubt RJ was that self-aware. He literally tore down almost all the unresolved major plot-threads (as bad as they may have ended up being) from TFA. That he was considering and/or communicating with Treverow or JJ is unlikely, because, you know, he's an auteur who likes to subvert expectations.
JJ did his own thing first without consideration for what came next (all the dangling plot threads). Then RJ said those were dumb, I'm going to do my own thing and completely Subvert Expectations®. Disney freaked out that a middle movie completely disconnected from the first, and zero coordination, got bad reviews so scrapped the existing screenplay and went back to JJ (ostensibly because TFA got decently reviewed). JJ did what he did best, make a bonkers movie with so many cool white board ideas that there was no real way to make sense of them.
Meanwhile, I've seen pretty much the opposite take: he's a kid that was groomed and abused. He doesn't need a redemption arc, he shouldn't be blamed for what was done to him and have to prove himself; he needs deprogramming, therapy, and support.
Personally, I submit that both real-world takes are a bad fit to a setting and writers that aren't interested and/or capable of telling either of those stories.
I don't think that's the opposite take so much as the other side of the same coin. I'm fine saying he was preyed upon by Snoke and then Palpatine. This doesn't change the fact that, from both viewing angles, a laser sword is the wrong tool for redemption and Star Wars is a bad fit for that kind of story.
I suspect it's less "this is what I intended to say in the film" and more "I'm not going to shit the bed here by saying something that contradicts what the people making Ep9 might be doing".
I doubt RJ was that self-aware. He literally tore down almost all the unresolved major plot-threads (as bad as they may have ended up being) from TFA. That he was considering and/or communicating with Treverow or JJ is unlikely, because, you know, he's an auteur who likes to subvert expectations.
JJ did his own thing first without consideration for what came next (all the dangling plot threads). Then RJ said those were dumb, I'm going to do my own thing and completely Subvert Expectations®. Disney freaked out that a middle movie completely disconnected from the first, and zero coordination, got bad reviews so scrapped the existing screenplay and went back to JJ (ostensibly because TFA got decently reviewed). JJ did what he did best, make a bonkers movie with so many cool white board ideas that there was no real way to make sense of them.
This doesn't even make sense. It's like two or three different weird things trying to be mashed together and also just wrong.
He's very clearly trying not to say anything that might contradict what is going to happen in Ep9. And he knows nothing about what is going to happen in Ep9 because he's got zero involvement in it. He literally says this right after the quote about Kylo Ren and Vader.
And TLJ doesn't tear down unresolved major plot points from TFA. It ties a bunch of them up. What Luke's been up to, Rey's parentage, Rey's training, what's going on with the First Order's war across the galaxy, etc. All resolved to one degree or another. I'd say about the only thing it definitively tosses aside rather then answers or leaves for the next film is Snoke and who and what he is. But more importantly that's basically got nothing to do with anything he's talking about. They aren't connected at all.
And finally your narrative here just doesn't make any sense. TLJ was both extremely well reviewed and extremely commercially successful. Johnson was never going to make Ep9, that was Treverrow and he got ditched it's suspected because Book of Henry was such a shitshow and they brought back in JJ because they needed someone super fast to take over the project. Every word of what you just said about this part was wrong.
In my opinion, Kylo Ren is a problem for the entire ST. Can he be redeemed? Yes. The problem is, he's a radicalized alt right member that fell into that life through privilege, not hardship. We have real world examples of former white supremacists that are making amends for their time in the dark. But those amends don't include blowing up the correct spaceship or cutting your old recruiter in half. They include speaking engagements at high schools and mentoring at risk kids. There is a story to tell about guys like this, but I think it was a big mistake to center your swashbuckler tale around them. He needed to stay bad or be completely different. Speaking for myself, I completely rejected him in TFA. He was already beyond my boundary. TLJ confirmed that his "fall" was due to his uncle seeing his shit posts and anti Semitic memes and rejecting him. There is no action/adventure solution to this. He's just another spoiled rich white man that went bad.
Besides which, it's been nearly 40 years since Vader, dying a noble death to avoid your due doesn't float the same way it used to. Oh, and the idea that Rey would be attracted to him makes my skin crawl and fills me with rage.
I don't think Kylo Ren is at all a problem for the trilogy. But I think what you are saying does highlight why the way TLJ goes with his redemption arc is the smarter play and why the third film should probably have stuck with that direction. He makes a good compelling villain.
When I think about I think JJ always wanted an Emperor type figure without thinking of why the Emperor was a compelling villain. He doesn't show up till the second movie. Even then he is pulling the strings but still in the background. In the third he shows how far ahead he is planning things. Lightning is cooler but the fact he is a competent villain is the real power he has. Snoke never felt at all like that.
And TLJ killing him annoyed JJ. But I agree it let Kylo, a much better villain, in charge. Kylo is a good villain because you can have empathy for his fall. He wasn't born evil, but he became and embraced it. He did the inverse of a Vader in 2. He turned away from the light.
I still want the last movie the art book shows. The fight between a Jedi Rey and Kylo. Coruscant is the center of the conflict as the center of the galaxy again. The rising up of the populace using old tools of the Empire to fight its successor. I mourn for my colorful AT-STs.
Yeah, I was really hoping for Ep9 to finish out the course that TLJ laid for the characters. Rey becomes a Jedi, Poe takes over the leadership role in the Resistance, Finn becomes a symbolic figurehead for the Rebellion. The idea of Finn leading a popular revolt is a really good one from that script I think.
+18
FencingsaxIt is difficult to get a man to understand, when his salary depends upon his not understandingGNU Terry PratchettRegistered Userregular
Honestly, this is all a consequence of the empire being considered "cool" for a while now, because the caricature evil they were in the original movies didn't sufficiently carry over the horror of the fascist regime it was, so people filled out the blanks with other stuff.
Nuanced is good. But nuanced doesn't mean "trivialize evil".
The Empire is authoritarian, a totalitarian dictatorship.
The First Order is explicitly fascist.
There are differences, and those differences are why portraying a sympathetic Imperial is completely different than portraying a sympathetic First Order.
In my opinion, Kylo Ren is a problem for the entire ST. Can he be redeemed? Yes. The problem is, he's a radicalized alt right member that fell into that life through privilege, not hardship. We have real world examples of former white supremacists that are making amends for their time in the dark. But those amends don't include blowing up the correct spaceship or cutting your old recruiter in half. They include speaking engagements at high schools and mentoring at risk kids. There is a story to tell about guys like this, but I think it was a big mistake to center your swashbuckler tale around them. He needed to stay bad or be completely different. Speaking for myself, I completely rejected him in TFA. He was already beyond my boundary. TLJ confirmed that his "fall" was due to his uncle seeing his shit posts and anti Semitic memes and rejecting him. There is no action/adventure solution to this. He's just another spoiled rich white man that went bad.
Besides which, it's been nearly 40 years since Vader, dying a noble death to avoid your due doesn't float the same way it used to. Oh, and the idea that Rey would be attracted to him makes my skin crawl and fills me with rage.
I don't think Kylo Ren is at all a problem for the trilogy. But I think what you are saying does highlight why the way TLJ goes with his redemption arc is the smarter play and why the third film should probably have stuck with that direction. He makes a good compelling villain.
Kylo is a problem inasmuch I don't give a fuck about him, so most of the conflict in any of the ST is immediately deadened for me.
How do you reject the patriarchy when the last patriarch has turned himself into a galaxy wide deity? Broom kid wasn't wistfully hoping to join up for feminism.
What?
Luke is the spark. The movie did not set up a rejection of the patriarchy, it reaffirmed it.
In what way is that the patriarchy?
Do I need to pull out the family tree? Luke couldn't possibly be more patriarchy, he's the grandson of the Imperial patriarch. But Broom Kid isn't playing with a Rey action figure, it's Luke. At best, it set up some Hidden Figures type scenario where Luke is the draw, Rey does the work. Yuck.
But I've consistently said that Luke ends the movie as a horrible, credit stealing villain, so take my opinion with a grain of salt. If a man finally mopping up the milk he spilled years ago is a galactic hero, and the woman that risks her life is in his shadow, we aren't talking about toppling the patriarchy.
TLJ is edited to try and make gender politics issues into Star Wars issues and it fits about as well early episodes of Stargate SG-1 which wanted to do this.
The "gender politics" in TLJ was Admiral Holdo being a woman in a dress.
Luke Skywalker literally walks out a vagina to be reborn. Holdo is actually a point of gender politics, intentionally even. (Part of her design and dress was to produce a conflicting perception in the mind of watchers who had a decidedly patriarchal worldview). Had Holdo been a gruff yelling man no one would have batted an eye at seeing poe as in the wrong.
TLJ really is a movie where gender themes are exceedingly present. It’s just not diegetic.
The history of cinema is littered with the stereotype of the out of touch commander who dismisses the valid concerns of the hero subordinates. It's not clever or subversive to drop a woman into that role and run the exact same trope to go "haha! I've totally proved you're just sexist!"
How do you reject the patriarchy when the last patriarch has turned himself into a galaxy wide deity? Broom kid wasn't wistfully hoping to join up for feminism.
What?
Luke is the spark. The movie did not set up a rejection of the patriarchy, it reaffirmed it.
In what way is that the patriarchy?
Do I need to pull out the family tree? Luke couldn't possibly be more patriarchy, he's the grandson of the Imperial patriarch. But Broom Kid isn't playing with a Rey action figure, it's Luke. At best, it set up some Hidden Figures type scenario where Luke is the draw, Rey does the work. Yuck.
But I've consistently said that Luke ends the movie as a horrible, credit stealing villain, so take my opinion with a grain of salt. If a man finally mopping up the milk he spilled years ago is a galactic hero, and the woman that risks her life is in his shadow, we aren't talking about toppling the patriarchy.
TLJ is edited to try and make gender politics issues into Star Wars issues and it fits about as well early episodes of Stargate SG-1 which wanted to do this.
The "gender politics" in TLJ was Admiral Holdo being a woman in a dress.
Luke Skywalker literally walks out a vagina to be reborn. Holdo is actually a point of gender politics, intentionally even. (Part of her design and dress was to produce a conflicting perception in the mind of watchers who had a decidedly patriarchal worldview). Had Holdo been a gruff yelling man no one would have batted an eye at seeing poe as in the wrong.
TLJ really is a movie where gender themes are exceedingly present. It’s just not diegetic.
The history of cinema is littered with the stereotype of the out of touch commander who dismisses the valid concerns of the hero subordinates. It's not clever or subversive to drop a woman into that role and run the exact same trope to go "haha! I've totally proved you're just sexist!"
Holdo's plan doesn't make a lick of sense anyway. She's right because the movie says so, but it doesn't back her up at all.
The Resistance would have escaped without the First Order knowing about them if Poe hadn't told Finn and Rose the plan, thus allowing DJ to overhear and rat them out.
The Resistance would have escaped without the First Order knowing about them if Poe hadn't told Finn and Rose the plan, thus allowing DJ to overhear and rat them out.
Its as much on Finn and Rose for bringing some rando into the inner circle.
Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
Holdo was wretched in a leadership position and it would've been absolutely no less awful or stupid for, say, Lando to be publicly humiliating one of the few remaining leaders in the Resistance. Just like it was a horrible, horrible idea (and hideously out of character for a lifetime leader) for Leia to physically strike Poe in front of everybody for disobeying orders, you don't do that shit in public. Even as a fuckup, Poe was still in a position of leadership, a position given to him by Leia, and now everybody in the command structure has watched not one but two major leaders blow their temper at an officer. Great work! Now nobody trusts Poe for being shit on, nobody trusts Holdo because she's fine with tearing up her officers in front of everybody, and nobody trusts Leia because apparently she'll just smack you and tear you down in front of everybody if you fuck up.
It's no wonder Holdo had to lock down the escape pods with the bullshit spy excuse because after all that crap being hashed out in front of the crew, I'd be looking for the first available escape pod too. Heck, I'd probably take my chances with a spacesuit and a radio.
The Resistance would have escaped without the First Order knowing about them if Poe hadn't told Finn and Rose the plan, thus allowing DJ to overhear and rat them out.
Yes, that is what the movie is trying to convey. It also lampshades that Kylo can sense Leia, a telescope can see all the transports easily, and there were about a million First Order eyeballs staring down the Resistance, all of them at battle stations with all the military surveillance gear that entails. As far as brilliant plans go, it's right up there with a child covering his own eyes to become invisible. So yeah, if only Poe and Co. hadn't screwed this up...
+7
Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
The Resistance would have escaped without the First Order knowing about them if Poe hadn't told Finn and Rose the plan, thus allowing DJ to overhear and rat them out.
Yes, that is what the movie is trying to convey. It also lampshades that Kylo can sense Leia, a telescope can see all the transports easily, and there were about a million First Order eyeballs staring down the Resistance, all of them at battle stations with all the military surveillance gear that entails. As far as brilliant plans go, it's right up there with a child covering his own eyes to become invisible. So yeah, if only Poe and Co. hadn't screwed this up...
It's a setting where you can have bionic eyes that let you zoom in on things, but spaceships having telescopes to navigate that infinite reaches of space is just too unbelievable.
Nevermind that some random off-duty stormtrooper could've seen the "cloaked" ships by watching the fleet with a pair of binoculars. Or that Snoke could easily see the whole fleet and any escaping ships on his Wonkascope.
TLJ was widely praised by critics. I don't know where you get the notion that it had bad reviews.
Just because critics gave it good reviews means that it didn't get poor reviews at all. The Rotten Tomatoes audience score is far lower. And yes, I realize that some of that is driven by the toxic man-children, but are the TLJ Brigade unable to accept that a lot of real life viewers don't like it for non-toxic reasons?
As for Shryke's point's, maybe a I didn't properly communicate my point. My main point was that there was zero cooperation, and zero coordination between the writing staff for each of the three movies. Even putting aside that a lot of that falls on Kennedy/LucasArts for allowing that to happen in the first place, I think that RJ just deciding to do his own thing without any sort of coordination is a failure on his part as a screenwriter/director when involved in a large group effort.
As you mentioned, TLJ takes a lot of the plot points from TFA and ties them up. But in a way it's clear that RJ thought they were dumb and just wanted to dispose of them. It was a narrative and stylistic whiplash from TFA. My point was that I guess, that RJ should have been professional enough to realize that there was that whiplash and not just do whatever he wanted, but try to make something that fits and flows from one movie to the next. Disney compounded the error by bringing back JJ to create an even more jarring and cognitively dissonant finale. You even mentioned that RJ had zero communication with Treverow or JJ about the direction that ep 9 was going. The question is why not?
The whole ST trilogy feels like one of those reddit creative writing threads where different authors pick up stories from where the previous author left off, but gone poorly because the authors just did whatever the hell they wanted without considering the direction of what came before.
I half-believe that Coruscant never shows up in the last 2 movies because most people still think it got blown up in TFA.
This is the first I've seen that it wasn't.
Apparently, the New Republic rotated its capital and some rando named "Hosnian Prime" was the unlucky winner.
Naturally, they only talk about this in EU material since nobody involved in ST could write worth a damn.
Eh. There might be a quick throwaway line on the Resistance base where they say “Hosnian system” and mention the Republic fleet got wrecked. But I don’t think that’s enough.
Also, the first 6 movies are pretty good at naming the planets they visit. JJ names...3 or 4 I think. Out of 5 in TFA and what, 6 in TROS?
+1
daveNYCWhy universe hate Waspinator?Registered Userregular
It does make me wonder if maybe half the reason they brought Palpatine back is because they were so desperate to do a Kylo Ren redemption arc and that means you need another villain to actually fight at the end. And, since you are JJ, why not bring back the exact same one that was used last time this kind of thing happened.
I half-believe that Coruscant never shows up in the last 2 movies because most people still think it got blown up in TFA.
Wait, it wasn't? I seriously thought that the one planetside shot of people watching the magic energy beam come in from Starkiller base was from Coruscant. Makes the whole thing even dumber because why would you reveal your super duper doomsday weapon, but not use it for a decapitation strike on your enemy's political center is... dubious. It's not even like the First Order had to make a tough call on which planet to hit, the damn thing was popping planets four or five at a time. Freaking Abrams. Not that Johnson was much better with just running with 'The First Order has won...' in the intro crawl. Might have added some drama to the space chase if they'd had Leia contacting the New Republic (or whatever they were calling it) for help and them being all spineless and noooooping out.
The Resistance would have escaped without the First Order knowing about them if Poe hadn't told Finn and Rose the plan, thus allowing DJ to overhear and rat them out.
Yes, that is what the movie is trying to convey. It also lampshades that Kylo can sense Leia, a telescope can see all the transports easily, and there were about a million First Order eyeballs staring down the Resistance, all of them at battle stations with all the military surveillance gear that entails. As far as brilliant plans go, it's right up there with a child covering his own eyes to become invisible. So yeah, if only Poe and Co. hadn't screwed this up...
This is basically what killed the movie for me. Poe's arc and to a lesser extent the conclusion of the Casino Planet side quest really depended on the Holdo/Leia plan being freaking awesome. A slam dunk that would have absolutely worked if it hadn't been for Poe being rash. I needed the revealed plan to give me the same feeling that Jules got from the following exchange.
Marsellus:
You ain't got no problem, Jules. I'm on the motherfucker. Go back in there and chill them *****s out and wait for The Wolf, who should be coming directly.
Jules:
[Jules pauses and becomes calm] You sending The Wolf?
Marsellus:
Oh, you feel better, motherfucker?
Jules:
[laughing] Shit, ****, that's all you had to say!
Instead the reveal had the opposite impact. It was more of a, "You guys suspected that this situation might come up and this is the best you could come up with?" There were just so many freaking points of failure on it that it was silly. That said, the plan could have been salvaged if they had decided to have Leia use the Force to hide the transports. That would have covered a lot of the weaknesses in the plan, plus would have given Kylo the opportunity to directly apply his Force powers against his mother in order to allow the transports to be targeted.
daveNYC on
Shut up, Mr. Burton! You were not brought upon this world to get it!
I half-believe that Coruscant never shows up in the last 2 movies because most people still think it got blown up in TFA.
This is the first I've seen that it wasn't.
Apparently, the New Republic rotated its capital and some rando named "Hosnian Prime" was the unlucky winner.
Naturally, they only talk about this in EU material since nobody involved in ST could write worth a damn.
Eh. There might be a quick throwaway line on the Resistance base where they say “Hosnian system” and mention the Republic fleet got wrecked. But I don’t think that’s enough.
Also, the first 6 movies are pretty good at naming the planets they visit. JJ names...3 or 4 I think. Out of 5 in TFA and what, 6 in TROS?
One of the annoying things in the ST and Rogue One is that they got lazy and tended to show a planet and slap a chyron on the screen or just not mention the planet at all (I had no idea that the planet destroyed in RoS was a place previously visited). The OT did a much better job of working that information into the dialogue.
Shut up, Mr. Burton! You were not brought upon this world to get it!
Had Holdo been a gruff yelling man no one would have batted an eye at seeing poe as in the wrong.
I agree with much of your statement about Holdo, but the above statement I don't think is true. While Holdo's gender and look certainly played into the audience's reaction to her, even if Holdo had been a "gruff yelling man" I think the audience would generally still be siding with Poe against Holdo. Two things play into this:
1) Poe is an established, likeable main character that the audience is rooting for and Holdo is a new character who is essentially introduced attacking a main character.
2) The audience wants to know what the plan to escape or defeat the First Order ship is as well, so naturally the audience is more likely to side with the character who wants the plan revealed rather than the character who wants to keep the plan hidden.
Certainly if the audience holds a patriarchal world view, the above reaction to Holdo is going to be reinforced, but I think the way Holdo is introduced in the movie and the side Holdo takes sets the character against the audience from the beginning. Perhaps in the aftermath of the movie, if Holdo has been a "gruff yelling man" more of the audience would have come around on Holdo and there would have been less controversy.
NebulousQ on
+12
reVerseAttack and Dethrone GodRegistered Userregular
The really bad thing about Holdo is that the moral of that story is "don't question your superiors, they're right", which isn't exactly a fitting theme for a resistance fighting against a fascist regime. That would still be a load of crap even if Holdo was a dude.
Really, the whole Hosnian/Starkiller thing is emblematic of how they half-assed the ST.
They wanted to replicate to big emotional moments of the OT, but neither understood why those moments worked nor willing to put in the effort to make them work. Nobody cares about Alderaan because of Alderaan. We care about it because we care about Princess Leia. None of the ST leads have any connection to Hosnian and none of them lose anything when it's destroyed. It's empty spectacle.
The ST succeeded where it was different from the OT—Finn's origin, the inversion of Rey's initial goals as compared to Luke, and Luke's criticism of the Old Order—and broadly failed where it tried to replicate it. Unfortunately, the ratio is firmly in favor of the latter.
The really bad thing about Holdo is that the moral of that story is "don't question your superiors, they're right", which isn't exactly a fitting theme for a resistance fighting against a fascist regime. That would still be a load of crap even if Holdo was a dude.
It's about having faith in each other and working together. Poe goes from zero to "Leia really fucked this one up" about five seconds after his rebuke.
Leia chose Holdo as her second over Poe and in the moments after making a huge strategic error he challenges her leadership. That's a massive personality flaw and a decent arc for a guy who was supposed to die in the first act of TFA and needed to find a place in the trilogy.
RedTide#1907 on Battle.net
Come Overwatch with meeeee
TLJ's resistance storyline is fundamentally flawed for a lot of reasons. One of the biggest is that Johnson was so apt to subvert tropes and deconstruct Star Wars that he never bothered to build a story past that. There's no real reason for Holdo to keep everyone in the dark, no real reason for Poe to go zero to mutiny in sixty seconds, except for Johnson to say "look kids, daring plans don't always work and sometimes you don't know best!"
Subverting expectations is great for plot twists and sudden reversals, but that's enough to carry a story. The best deconstructions work because of what they do after the deconstructing. Once Johnson's finished blowing up Star Wars tropes, the movie ends. There's nothing else. When you build an entire story on novelty and nothing else, the audience is less likely to marvel at your genius than wonder why they bothered.
The other big problem is awful pacing. It's a movie-length chase scene that's supposed to be hectic enough to justify constant panic yet slow enough that we've got time for two entire side adventures before the end. Why they didn't just have them reach the salt planet in Act 1 and just have the First Oder be on their way, I'll never know.
The really bad thing about Holdo is that the moral of that story is "don't question your superiors, they're right", which isn't exactly a fitting theme for a resistance fighting against a fascist regime. That would still be a load of crap even if Holdo was a dude.
No, the moral was "When you make a mistake, admit it, accept the consequences, and learn from it. Don't continue making even more mistakes in a quest to prove it wasn't."
Just remember that half the people you meet are below average intelligence.
+5
Inquisitor772 x Penny Arcade Fight Club ChampionA fixed point in space and timeRegistered Userregular
You can't fault RJ for not talking with Trevorrow or JJ about Ep9 because he was deep in production by the time Trevorrow was picked for Ep9.
This is why I keep pointing out that Kathleen Kennedy bears no small amount of responsibility for how these films have turned out, as she was put in charge of the entire Star Wars franchise.
It's worth noting that when you watch the behind-the-scenes for The Mandalorian you see multiple writers and directors on set having discussions constantly across all the episodes, with Filoni and Favreau ever-present. If Kennedy was unwilling to take up a similar Feige-like role herself, she should've designated someone to that position at the start rather than giving Abrams and Johnson free reign to do whatever they wanted within their individual films.
And it's also worth nothing that before Feigi, Filoni, and Favreau, there was George Lucas himself.
You can't fault RJ for not talking with Trevorrow or JJ about Ep9 because he was deep in production by the time Trevorrow was picked for Ep9.
This is why I keep pointing out that Kathleen Kennedy bears no small amount of responsibility for how these films have turned out, as she was put in charge of the entire Star Wars franchise.
It's worth noting that when you watch the behind-the-scenes for The Mandalorian you see multiple writers and directors on set having discussions constantly across all the episodes, with Filoni and Favreau ever-present. If Kennedy was unwilling to take up a similar Feige-like role herself, she should've designated someone to that position at the start rather than giving Abrams and Johnson free reign to do whatever they wanted within their individual films.
And it's also worth nothing that before Feigi, Filoni, and Favreau, there was George Lucas himself.
I mean, it does sound like JJ created draft scripts for Ep 8 and Ep 9, and discussed them with RJ. RJ then scrapped everything JJ had written and rewrote Ep 8 from scratch, acccording to Daisy Ridley. This also makes a bit more sense when you read between the lines re: Boyega's disdain for TLJ, as it sounds like JJ had previously discussed a clear cut role going forward for Finn, likely a jedi, and RJ scrapped that completely. Why LucasArts gave RJ the ability to essentially completely rewrite the entire direction in the middle of a trilogy, is still beyond me.
Even if someone absolutely loves TLJ, I think they have to at least admit that it was a vast departure thematically, stylistically, and narratively from TFA. What other successful unified movie series (telling a single story) bounced between directors and writers with such stylistic differences? At least all the other's I've seen, have been from a singular mind and director (LOTR, Nolan Batman, Godfather, etc.). The original Star Wars trilogy might ironically be considered the outlier, though I think can be chalked up as a happy accident, as most of the actual content came from Lucas, just with help filtering out his crazy.
+7
ShadowenSnores in the morningLoserdomRegistered Userregular
Really, the whole Hosnian/Starkiller thing is emblematic of how they half-assed the ST.
They wanted to replicate to big emotional moments of the OT, but neither understood why those moments worked nor willing to put in the effort to make them work. Nobody cares about Alderaan because of Alderaan. We care about it because we care about Princess Leia. None of the ST leads have any connection to Hosnian and none of them lose anything when it's destroyed. It's empty spectacle.
Flawed as it was, that's one thing Resistance got right...sorta. The main character of the show was from Hosnian Prime, and the show starts about six months before Force Awakens. The show struggled with him being a bit of a twerp at the start...but he actually grows over the first season from twerp to pretty good main character and burgeoning hero. (Aside from a handful of cameos by Kylo Ren and a couple of minor supporting characters there was no Force use in the show, either. He doesn't start a klutz and become a graceful Force-user, he starts a klutz--outside of a cockpit, anyway; he's a good pilot--and he ends a klutz with certain skills he's picked up along the way.)
And then at the end of season 1 he watches as the First Order destroys his home. And it hits harder in this mediocre children's cartoon than it did in a 200-million dollar movie.
You can't fault RJ for not talking with Trevorrow or JJ about Ep9 because he was deep in production by the time Trevorrow was picked for Ep9.
This is why I keep pointing out that Kathleen Kennedy bears no small amount of responsibility for how these films have turned out, as she was put in charge of the entire Star Wars franchise.
It's worth noting that when you watch the behind-the-scenes for The Mandalorian you see multiple writers and directors on set having discussions constantly across all the episodes, with Filoni and Favreau ever-present. If Kennedy was unwilling to take up a similar Feige-like role herself, she should've designated someone to that position at the start rather than giving Abrams and Johnson free reign to do whatever they wanted within their individual films.
And it's also worth nothing that before Feigi, Filoni, and Favreau, there was George Lucas himself.
I mean, it does sound like JJ created draft scripts for Ep 8 and Ep 9, and discussed them with RJ. RJ then scrapped everything JJ had written and rewrote Ep 8 from scratch, acccording to Daisy Ridley. This also makes a bit more sense when you read between the lines re: Boyega's disdain for TLJ, as it sounds like JJ had previously discussed a clear cut role going forward for Finn, likely a jedi, and RJ scrapped that completely. Why LucasArts gave RJ the ability to essentially completely rewrite the entire direction in the middle of a trilogy, is still beyond me.
Even if someone absolutely loves TLJ, I think they have to at least admit that it was a vast departure thematically, stylistically, and narratively from TFA. What other successful unified movie series (telling a single story) bounced between directors and writers with such stylistic differences? At least all the other's I've seen, have been from a singular mind and director (LOTR, Nolan Batman, Godfather, etc.). The original Star Wars trilogy might ironically be considered the outlier, though I think can be chalked up as a happy accident, as most of the actual content came from Lucas, just with help filtering out his crazy.
The Harry Potter movies bounced between directors and writers for a bit, but since they're based on a book series they had a north star to follow, meaning they didn't suffer as much for switching things up between movies as the ST did.
You can't fault RJ for not talking with Trevorrow or JJ about Ep9 because he was deep in production by the time Trevorrow was picked for Ep9.
This is why I keep pointing out that Kathleen Kennedy bears no small amount of responsibility for how these films have turned out, as she was put in charge of the entire Star Wars franchise.
It's worth noting that when you watch the behind-the-scenes for The Mandalorian you see multiple writers and directors on set having discussions constantly across all the episodes, with Filoni and Favreau ever-present. If Kennedy was unwilling to take up a similar Feige-like role herself, she should've designated someone to that position at the start rather than giving Abrams and Johnson free reign to do whatever they wanted within their individual films.
And it's also worth nothing that before Feigi, Filoni, and Favreau, there was George Lucas himself.
I mean, it does sound like JJ created draft scripts for Ep 8 and Ep 9, and discussed them with RJ. RJ then scrapped everything JJ had written and rewrote Ep 8 from scratch, acccording to Daisy Ridley. This also makes a bit more sense when you read between the lines re: Boyega's disdain for TLJ, as it sounds like JJ had previously discussed a clear cut role going forward for Finn, likely a jedi, and RJ scrapped that completely. Why LucasArts gave RJ the ability to essentially completely rewrite the entire direction in the middle of a trilogy, is still beyond me.
Even if someone absolutely loves TLJ, I think they have to at least admit that it was a vast departure thematically, stylistically, and narratively from TFA. What other successful unified movie series (telling a single story) bounced between directors and writers with such stylistic differences? At least all the other's I've seen, have been from a singular mind and director (LOTR, Nolan Batman, Godfather, etc.). The original Star Wars trilogy might ironically be considered the outlier, though I think can be chalked up as a happy accident, as most of the actual content came from Lucas, just with help filtering out his crazy.
Nah, it carries on directly from the story threads in the storythreads established in TFA. It is stylistically different to some extent in that it's a different director. Oh, also the writing is a lot more competent to the point that you don't need to tie-in comic to know wtf is going on.
As for any scripts that JJ might have written, he was never signed on to direct the next 2 instalments anyway. Plus, you know, they brought him back for Ep9 and he completely chucked Treverrow's script and rewrote it and we all saw how that turned out. "JJ had a plan from the start" is like the least compelling argument about the ST imaginable.
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Besides which, it's been nearly 40 years since Vader, dying a noble death to avoid your due doesn't float the same way it used to. Oh, and the idea that Rey would be attracted to him makes my skin crawl and fills me with rage.
Nuanced is good. But nuanced doesn't mean "trivialize evil".
Personally, I submit that both real-world takes are a bad fit to a setting and writers that aren't interested and/or capable of telling either of those stories.
I doubt RJ was that self-aware. He literally tore down almost all the unresolved major plot-threads (as bad as they may have ended up being) from TFA. That he was considering and/or communicating with Treverow or JJ is unlikely, because, you know, he's an auteur who likes to subvert expectations.
JJ did his own thing first without consideration for what came next (all the dangling plot threads). Then RJ said those were dumb, I'm going to do my own thing and completely Subvert Expectations®. Disney freaked out that a middle movie completely disconnected from the first, and zero coordination, got bad reviews so scrapped the existing screenplay and went back to JJ (ostensibly because TFA got decently reviewed). JJ did what he did best, make a bonkers movie with so many cool white board ideas that there was no real way to make sense of them.
I don't think that's the opposite take so much as the other side of the same coin. I'm fine saying he was preyed upon by Snoke and then Palpatine. This doesn't change the fact that, from both viewing angles, a laser sword is the wrong tool for redemption and Star Wars is a bad fit for that kind of story.
It has bad user reviews, but then TRoS has great user reviews so that should tell us everything we need.
This doesn't even make sense. It's like two or three different weird things trying to be mashed together and also just wrong.
He's very clearly trying not to say anything that might contradict what is going to happen in Ep9. And he knows nothing about what is going to happen in Ep9 because he's got zero involvement in it. He literally says this right after the quote about Kylo Ren and Vader.
And TLJ doesn't tear down unresolved major plot points from TFA. It ties a bunch of them up. What Luke's been up to, Rey's parentage, Rey's training, what's going on with the First Order's war across the galaxy, etc. All resolved to one degree or another. I'd say about the only thing it definitively tosses aside rather then answers or leaves for the next film is Snoke and who and what he is. But more importantly that's basically got nothing to do with anything he's talking about. They aren't connected at all.
And finally your narrative here just doesn't make any sense. TLJ was both extremely well reviewed and extremely commercially successful. Johnson was never going to make Ep9, that was Treverrow and he got ditched it's suspected because Book of Henry was such a shitshow and they brought back in JJ because they needed someone super fast to take over the project. Every word of what you just said about this part was wrong.
I don't think Kylo Ren is at all a problem for the trilogy. But I think what you are saying does highlight why the way TLJ goes with his redemption arc is the smarter play and why the third film should probably have stuck with that direction. He makes a good compelling villain.
And TLJ killing him annoyed JJ. But I agree it let Kylo, a much better villain, in charge. Kylo is a good villain because you can have empathy for his fall. He wasn't born evil, but he became and embraced it. He did the inverse of a Vader in 2. He turned away from the light.
I still want the last movie the art book shows. The fight between a Jedi Rey and Kylo. Coruscant is the center of the conflict as the center of the galaxy again. The rising up of the populace using old tools of the Empire to fight its successor. I mourn for my colorful AT-STs.
The Empire is authoritarian, a totalitarian dictatorship.
The First Order is explicitly fascist.
There are differences, and those differences are why portraying a sympathetic Imperial is completely different than portraying a sympathetic First Order.
Kylo is a problem inasmuch I don't give a fuck about him, so most of the conflict in any of the ST is immediately deadened for me.
The history of cinema is littered with the stereotype of the out of touch commander who dismisses the valid concerns of the hero subordinates. It's not clever or subversive to drop a woman into that role and run the exact same trope to go "haha! I've totally proved you're just sexist!"
Holdo's plan doesn't make a lick of sense anyway. She's right because the movie says so, but it doesn't back her up at all.
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Its as much on Finn and Rose for bringing some rando into the inner circle.
It's no wonder Holdo had to lock down the escape pods with the bullshit spy excuse because after all that crap being hashed out in front of the crew, I'd be looking for the first available escape pod too. Heck, I'd probably take my chances with a spacesuit and a radio.
Yes, that is what the movie is trying to convey. It also lampshades that Kylo can sense Leia, a telescope can see all the transports easily, and there were about a million First Order eyeballs staring down the Resistance, all of them at battle stations with all the military surveillance gear that entails. As far as brilliant plans go, it's right up there with a child covering his own eyes to become invisible. So yeah, if only Poe and Co. hadn't screwed this up...
It's a setting where you can have bionic eyes that let you zoom in on things, but spaceships having telescopes to navigate that infinite reaches of space is just too unbelievable.
Nevermind that some random off-duty stormtrooper could've seen the "cloaked" ships by watching the fleet with a pair of binoculars. Or that Snoke could easily see the whole fleet and any escaping ships on his Wonkascope.
This is the first I've seen that it wasn't.
Apparently, the New Republic rotated its capital and some rando named "Hosnian Prime" was the unlucky winner.
Naturally, they only talk about this in EU material since nobody involved in ST could write worth a damn.
Just because critics gave it good reviews means that it didn't get poor reviews at all. The Rotten Tomatoes audience score is far lower. And yes, I realize that some of that is driven by the toxic man-children, but are the TLJ Brigade unable to accept that a lot of real life viewers don't like it for non-toxic reasons?
As for Shryke's point's, maybe a I didn't properly communicate my point. My main point was that there was zero cooperation, and zero coordination between the writing staff for each of the three movies. Even putting aside that a lot of that falls on Kennedy/LucasArts for allowing that to happen in the first place, I think that RJ just deciding to do his own thing without any sort of coordination is a failure on his part as a screenwriter/director when involved in a large group effort.
As you mentioned, TLJ takes a lot of the plot points from TFA and ties them up. But in a way it's clear that RJ thought they were dumb and just wanted to dispose of them. It was a narrative and stylistic whiplash from TFA. My point was that I guess, that RJ should have been professional enough to realize that there was that whiplash and not just do whatever he wanted, but try to make something that fits and flows from one movie to the next. Disney compounded the error by bringing back JJ to create an even more jarring and cognitively dissonant finale. You even mentioned that RJ had zero communication with Treverow or JJ about the direction that ep 9 was going. The question is why not?
The whole ST trilogy feels like one of those reddit creative writing threads where different authors pick up stories from where the previous author left off, but gone poorly because the authors just did whatever the hell they wanted without considering the direction of what came before.
Eh. There might be a quick throwaway line on the Resistance base where they say “Hosnian system” and mention the Republic fleet got wrecked. But I don’t think that’s enough.
Also, the first 6 movies are pretty good at naming the planets they visit. JJ names...3 or 4 I think. Out of 5 in TFA and what, 6 in TROS?
Wait, it wasn't? I seriously thought that the one planetside shot of people watching the magic energy beam come in from Starkiller base was from Coruscant. Makes the whole thing even dumber because why would you reveal your super duper doomsday weapon, but not use it for a decapitation strike on your enemy's political center is... dubious. It's not even like the First Order had to make a tough call on which planet to hit, the damn thing was popping planets four or five at a time. Freaking Abrams. Not that Johnson was much better with just running with 'The First Order has won...' in the intro crawl. Might have added some drama to the space chase if they'd had Leia contacting the New Republic (or whatever they were calling it) for help and them being all spineless and noooooping out.
This is basically what killed the movie for me. Poe's arc and to a lesser extent the conclusion of the Casino Planet side quest really depended on the Holdo/Leia plan being freaking awesome. A slam dunk that would have absolutely worked if it hadn't been for Poe being rash. I needed the revealed plan to give me the same feeling that Jules got from the following exchange.
Instead the reveal had the opposite impact. It was more of a, "You guys suspected that this situation might come up and this is the best you could come up with?" There were just so many freaking points of failure on it that it was silly. That said, the plan could have been salvaged if they had decided to have Leia use the Force to hide the transports. That would have covered a lot of the weaknesses in the plan, plus would have given Kylo the opportunity to directly apply his Force powers against his mother in order to allow the transports to be targeted.
That hot Star Trek reboot "the stuff that makes any of the plot comprehensible is in the tie-in material" energy.
One of the annoying things in the ST and Rogue One is that they got lazy and tended to show a planet and slap a chyron on the screen or just not mention the planet at all (I had no idea that the planet destroyed in RoS was a place previously visited). The OT did a much better job of working that information into the dialogue.
I agree with much of your statement about Holdo, but the above statement I don't think is true. While Holdo's gender and look certainly played into the audience's reaction to her, even if Holdo had been a "gruff yelling man" I think the audience would generally still be siding with Poe against Holdo. Two things play into this:
1) Poe is an established, likeable main character that the audience is rooting for and Holdo is a new character who is essentially introduced attacking a main character.
2) The audience wants to know what the plan to escape or defeat the First Order ship is as well, so naturally the audience is more likely to side with the character who wants the plan revealed rather than the character who wants to keep the plan hidden.
Certainly if the audience holds a patriarchal world view, the above reaction to Holdo is going to be reinforced, but I think the way Holdo is introduced in the movie and the side Holdo takes sets the character against the audience from the beginning. Perhaps in the aftermath of the movie, if Holdo has been a "gruff yelling man" more of the audience would have come around on Holdo and there would have been less controversy.
They wanted to replicate to big emotional moments of the OT, but neither understood why those moments worked nor willing to put in the effort to make them work. Nobody cares about Alderaan because of Alderaan. We care about it because we care about Princess Leia. None of the ST leads have any connection to Hosnian and none of them lose anything when it's destroyed. It's empty spectacle.
The ST succeeded where it was different from the OT—Finn's origin, the inversion of Rey's initial goals as compared to Luke, and Luke's criticism of the Old Order—and broadly failed where it tried to replicate it. Unfortunately, the ratio is firmly in favor of the latter.
It's about having faith in each other and working together. Poe goes from zero to "Leia really fucked this one up" about five seconds after his rebuke.
Leia chose Holdo as her second over Poe and in the moments after making a huge strategic error he challenges her leadership. That's a massive personality flaw and a decent arc for a guy who was supposed to die in the first act of TFA and needed to find a place in the trilogy.
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Subverting expectations is great for plot twists and sudden reversals, but that's enough to carry a story. The best deconstructions work because of what they do after the deconstructing. Once Johnson's finished blowing up Star Wars tropes, the movie ends. There's nothing else. When you build an entire story on novelty and nothing else, the audience is less likely to marvel at your genius than wonder why they bothered.
The other big problem is awful pacing. It's a movie-length chase scene that's supposed to be hectic enough to justify constant panic yet slow enough that we've got time for two entire side adventures before the end. Why they didn't just have them reach the salt planet in Act 1 and just have the First Oder be on their way, I'll never know.
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No, the moral was "When you make a mistake, admit it, accept the consequences, and learn from it. Don't continue making even more mistakes in a quest to prove it wasn't."
This is why I keep pointing out that Kathleen Kennedy bears no small amount of responsibility for how these films have turned out, as she was put in charge of the entire Star Wars franchise.
It's worth noting that when you watch the behind-the-scenes for The Mandalorian you see multiple writers and directors on set having discussions constantly across all the episodes, with Filoni and Favreau ever-present. If Kennedy was unwilling to take up a similar Feige-like role herself, she should've designated someone to that position at the start rather than giving Abrams and Johnson free reign to do whatever they wanted within their individual films.
And it's also worth nothing that before Feigi, Filoni, and Favreau, there was George Lucas himself.
I mean, it does sound like JJ created draft scripts for Ep 8 and Ep 9, and discussed them with RJ. RJ then scrapped everything JJ had written and rewrote Ep 8 from scratch, acccording to Daisy Ridley. This also makes a bit more sense when you read between the lines re: Boyega's disdain for TLJ, as it sounds like JJ had previously discussed a clear cut role going forward for Finn, likely a jedi, and RJ scrapped that completely. Why LucasArts gave RJ the ability to essentially completely rewrite the entire direction in the middle of a trilogy, is still beyond me.
Even if someone absolutely loves TLJ, I think they have to at least admit that it was a vast departure thematically, stylistically, and narratively from TFA. What other successful unified movie series (telling a single story) bounced between directors and writers with such stylistic differences? At least all the other's I've seen, have been from a singular mind and director (LOTR, Nolan Batman, Godfather, etc.). The original Star Wars trilogy might ironically be considered the outlier, though I think can be chalked up as a happy accident, as most of the actual content came from Lucas, just with help filtering out his crazy.
Flawed as it was, that's one thing Resistance got right...sorta. The main character of the show was from Hosnian Prime, and the show starts about six months before Force Awakens. The show struggled with him being a bit of a twerp at the start...but he actually grows over the first season from twerp to pretty good main character and burgeoning hero. (Aside from a handful of cameos by Kylo Ren and a couple of minor supporting characters there was no Force use in the show, either. He doesn't start a klutz and become a graceful Force-user, he starts a klutz--outside of a cockpit, anyway; he's a good pilot--and he ends a klutz with certain skills he's picked up along the way.)
And then at the end of season 1 he watches as the First Order destroys his home. And it hits harder in this mediocre children's cartoon than it did in a 200-million dollar movie.
The Harry Potter movies bounced between directors and writers for a bit, but since they're based on a book series they had a north star to follow, meaning they didn't suffer as much for switching things up between movies as the ST did.
Nah, it carries on directly from the story threads in the storythreads established in TFA. It is stylistically different to some extent in that it's a different director. Oh, also the writing is a lot more competent to the point that you don't need to tie-in comic to know wtf is going on.
As for any scripts that JJ might have written, he was never signed on to direct the next 2 instalments anyway. Plus, you know, they brought him back for Ep9 and he completely chucked Treverrow's script and rewrote it and we all saw how that turned out. "JJ had a plan from the start" is like the least compelling argument about the ST imaginable.