Incorrect. All three were crap because no one sat down to create an overall three part story at the start.
Director A went in Direction 1, but Director B was allowed to do whatever the hell he wanted and went in Direction π with no intention to bring us back to even an integer direction. Director A then led us into imaginary numbers which led to a steaming pile of a trilogy.
Johnson laid down plot threads for Rey and Luke (and possibly a redeemed Ben) to address the failures of the jedi order and create a new path for force users. I was completely hyped at the announcement of the 9th movies title Rise of Skywalker as I was envisioning Skywalker to become the name of grey jedi, who don't forsake attachments. Along with a final battle of Rey vs Ben, while overlapped a battle of force ghost Luke fought a spectral Palpatine. What we got was a child angry someone tried to do something they couldn't understand with their toys.
Johnson had plenty of direction in his movie, most fans were just hurt that Luke wasn't lionized like the EU had done with his character. TLJ's Luke was a 180 from what everyone was expecting (Hamill included) and that left a bad taste in alot of peoples mouths. It was 100% in character for him to become a hermit though, look at everyone of his mentors.
When Mark Hamill dislikes what was done to Luke then what was done was wrong. The whole bitter hermit approah was stupid and is Luke repeating the mistakes of his mentors.
TLJ undermined a ton of character development for the sake of subverting everything including what little internal consistency existed in the Star Wars universe.
The first 6 movies pretty conclusively covered the failure of the jedi order and their flaws. TLJ is a lazy retread of this beaten to death point. We did get the whole rich people sold things to both sides point, but it's purely surface level and doesn't get explored to any degree.
It left the resistance at a ship full of people and the big bad being kylo who already got beat by Rey in 7 and outsmarted by Luke in 8. He somehow has to redeem himself in 9 while allowing the rest of the bad guys to remain bad, because if he's actually the leader he can just stop everything.
Luke's mentors were hermits because they were in hiding. It makes no sense for Luke to hide from a galaxy, there wasn't an empire actively hunting him. Him being in hiding was JJ's fault, but the reason was entirely left to Johnson and he fumbled it.
The hermit thing was only something his mentors did because they were in hiding from the ruling power. Once RoTJ finishes, the empire can no longer force jedi into hiding.
Director A didn’t even go in any direction with the first movie, TFA is practically ANH with different window dressing. TLJ was probably the best half-of-a-movie with the Rey and Kylo bits, and even then it’s moreso a case of “the best of the worst” than it being a good movie on its own merits. Then TRoS comes in and basically ruins the future of the franchise because JJ is a fucking hack who has only made one decent movie in his entire career. Also doesn’t help Disney shafted Boyega and Isaac hard in TLJ and TRoS, and that they literally had the entire plot point of Finn being Force-sensitive explored in the Lego Holiday Special rather than the mainline movies.
Now we see Disney is trying to keep the franchise afloat with all of these shows that always take place before TFA. But once we filled in all the gaps between each movie from 1-6… when are we gonna see something new from Star Wars that takes place after TRoS?
Disney have to bring in shows that take place prior to the sequels because their only attempt at anything extraneous to the movies within the “sequel era” was Resistance which went over poorly.
When it comes to the sequels, it’s that Spider-Man meme of Abrams and Johnson pointing at one another over who ruined what more. Abrams started a very basic, formulaic trilogy that had very clearly intended plot points; Rey was going to be the hidden of child/grandchild of Luke, Kenobi, Qui-Gon, whomever, Finn was going to be this Trooper-turned-Jedi character we’d never seen before, and Poe was going to follow a Han Solo archetype. Rian decides that this is banal (it was) and throws out everything that was loosely started in TFA to “subvert expectations”, which would have been fine if Rian had started the trilogy.
Asinine as the rehashed plot of TFA was, Rian shouldn’t have taken the project if he had no intentions of following through on those loose plot points. Instead, TLJ has no connection to TFA and is a horrible second entry point in a trilogy. I would have welcomed the idea of Rey being a complete nobody and that the strongest Force-user is just a random person, not connected to the Skywalkers, but TFA didn’t allow for that. TFA shoe-horned this trilogy into unoriginal, simplistic storytelling, and you can’t suddenly throw out everything that was setup and offer nothing in its place.
TFA set us up with a ton of questions to be answered: what was Rey’s connection to the Skywalkers, how will Finn become a Jedi, what did Luke create following RotJ and why did he abandon it, who/what is Snoke, how did this First Order come to be and gain power after the end of RotJ… TFA opens the door, with the intention of the second act answering all these questions, and the third act showing good prevailing over evil once again. TLJ, however, doesn’t bother to answer any of the questions or expand any of the new characters presented to us. Then in comes TRoS like a wrecking ball, trying to make connections back to TFA and failing hard as it reverts everything that TLJ reverted.
In short, Disney figured they’d bought the golden goose and all they had to do was just sit in on the nest to rake in the billions, but forgot you need to actually feed and nurture the damn thing. They gave two hack directors no boundaries and then stood with Shocked Pikachu face when they produced a hacked up story.
What Disney need to do is just claim that the “end” of the Skywalker saga is part of Legends, recast Luke, Leia, and Han and give us something that resembles Heir to the Empire, or create something entirely original, so that we have an actual sequel to the OT.
no one sat down to create an overall three part story at the start.
I still can't wrap my head around that. It's just so stupid. Did they think the movies would be successful by the brand (and nostalgia) alone?
And now we get Dave Filoni's key-jingling "remember this".
Best reply thus far to this flamebait post!
Every new movie in this fucked up "trilogy" was really just shitting on the last movie.
So one may shit (legitimately) on the third movie (I don't even remember the title, lol), but they won't admit that it's partly because Galaxy Brain Johnson ended his pretentious movie with ZERO interesting story to tell, having killed both the arch-nemesis and Luke... among so many other appealing characters. This could have just ended there, as a two-parts Star Wars saga with a crappy storyline involving some Galactic Empire 2.0 and its Supreme Leader we're told nothing about.
There was one man who carried the sequels hard. One man that no matter what shit the sequels threw at him he turned to gold. Yet here you are implying he couldn't have been the central antagonist for the last movie?!
Also so what Luke died in some epic space wizardry?! Force ghosts meant he could have played just as big a part in the final act. That's not the detriment you claim it to be.
Yeah it’s embarrassing to see adults engage in a tug of war like they did. With all their money and all the years they had to plan those movies, it’s ridiculous that they couldn’t plan out a three act story, and wound up with one director going rogue.
Okay hear me out. Has Abrams ever written a coherent ending?
Rian Johnson was too busy marketing himself as a creative genius who was breaking the mold to make a good movie. The worst part is people bought that horseshit and think that jj Abrams ruined rians perfect vision.
They should have given 7 and 8 to Abrams and 9 to Johnson. Abrams is good at storytelling and establishing universes, but when's the last time he's written an ending you were happy with?
It wasn't leading the story anywhere, it was a plot contrivance that hamfistedly side loaded a "war profiteering bad" message that's been in Star Wars since at least the Clone Wars and done far better there.
Not only that, but the concept is being explained to the child soldier turned rebel as if he doesn't know that it's bad. He should be the one explaining it to Rose, but we can't have that because she's a girl boss with no obstacles to overcome or ignorances to set straight. All of her problems are external and no further self improvement was possible.
TLJ at least tried something new. Granted, it didn't work. But it was better than just rebooting and rehashing the same old thing over and over again.
At this point I statistically just don't like SW anymore. Like, there are only three I am comfortable calling "good" movies (New Hope, Empire and Rogue One) and the others are somewhere between "just okay" to "so bad that it's annoying to watch".
And at this rate, Disney is gonna put out a new THING every year, so like.... Who even cares anymore?
This was the true Star Wars Sucks Wednesday I was hoping to see.
Wait... what's wrong with Return of th- Oh... it's the Ewoks, isn't it?
You mean the wookies spelled backwards? Because they are tiny?
They might be a factor...
Going back and watching force awakens a while after ep9, I came to realize I actually only like og trilogy, and Phantom for nostalgia / bad movie and podracer reasons. The games however are great, especially Kotor, and realized that's why I like the franchise so much
%1000 this. But even for all the bad things about Canto Bight, it had something to say about the Star Wars universe and how we should feel about the way Disney intends to use the property and that was crazy clever.
For sure, it's biggest issue had more to do with the way Finn and Rose had to leave a lightspeed chase and go have casino hijinks, while the chase was ongoing. It just was really bad from the pacing perspective.
Having a side quest where nothing was accomplished and they did a trivial amount of damage that would immediately be undone was crazy clever?
Was that aspect of this part of the story good? No, it had flaws.
Was it worse than having a super-ultra-duper-mega Death Star reset all of the progress from the entire franchise by blowing up every single republic planet with one multiple shot from across the galaxy? Also, no. Not by half.
I left Force Awakens feeling defeated by Star Wars. We're not allowed to have character growth, we're not allowed to ever have the universe move past the empire, everything has to stay in this permanent state of always at war because that's the brand and everything in the universe that tries to be different gets pushed back into its little box.
And the scenes in Canto Bight and with the cracker said that out loud. That it's all war and it will always be that way as long as the people selling the war are making money. It was different and it felt different.
And then Disney came back with Rise of the Skywalker and pushed it all back in the box and did everything it could to walk it back validating everything it had to say.
So, yeah... despite its narrative flaws with pacing it was pretty brilliant and spot on. And it's weird that it bothers you more than any of the bizarre pacing and character crap in the other two movies. It's all bad storytelling, why is the bad story telling that has something to say the part that bothers you the most?
Canto Bight was 100% about Disney, which is the only part where it was "clever".
I'm sorry but Grey Jedi are aberrations of Legends. A jedi who is balanced in the force is just a Jedi. You cannot balance with the dark side, it is corruption. I don't see them making it to the big screen, and if they do I don't see it making sense or being good.
There's also people who don't agree with the jedi institution, but they aren't jedi, just force users. That's what I think the "gray jedi" theme should be. Those who recognize the flaws of the jedi institution but are light side still. The jedi are just so tied into the light side themes in Star Wars that they won't critique it in the mainline stories.
Its just one of those things thats not gonna translate well with a 2 hour movie. Like in the videogames, being grey works because the sark/light side indicator is a slider and YOU control your actions. In the supposed lore of the movies, the dark side is like an addiction and even using it once can send a jedi spiraling. So it just doesn't translate well. Its cool in the games to shoot lightning and then turn around and heal someone. In the movies, it just doesn't mash well with what is established.
by this logic, johnson also couldn't understand a fellow creative's vision
3 threw the plot of 2 in the bin, but only because 2 had already thrown the plot of 1 in the bin
Your not entirely wrong, expect there was so little plot to 7, it was a rehash of 4 with little to no characterization given to the people it introduces.
Finn is a stormtrooper traumatized by the death of a fellow trooper in the first scene, only to be whooping at killing them himself about an hour later. Why is the Falcon on Jakku? Anakin's lightsaber?!
Those are good questions... for another time
Went to new and interesting places
But where?
Canto Bight
......
"Canto Blight is new and interesting"
😬
But it's not thematically new or interesting either.
I was late in getting into Rebels so I saw the Bendu arc shortly before seeing TLJ and I was super excited about grey jedi and a rethinking of the old "good vs evil" theme and where the galaxy as a whole would go from there.
Then ROS came out and turns out it when no where. Like an angry dad on a road trip it just turned around and ended exactly where it started
Ima just going to leave this here… it’s what we should have gotten!
What the fucks a Canto Bight
I assume it's the weird casino sidetrip that ultimately made absolutely no difference to the plot in the middle of the tense dramatic sloooooooooow chase scene that spanned the entire movie.
A slow chase that doesn't make any goddamn sense by any established rule and is resolved by completely breaking the very idea of fleet combat in Star Wars.
Which, you know, could have been interesting if RoS had them beat the surprise fleet by reusing the tactic.
That'd have been pretty cool imo, just shatter the very concept of Star Wars capital ships as a result of progressing technology, and make any future space combat be limited to fighters and light cruisers or whatever.
