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Competent Director, and completely incompetent story teller. Just like Rian Johnson!
I think you got that the wrong way around
No, Rian Johnson is a pretty shit storyteller as well.
A competent storyteller would have seen that Carrie Fisher died, looked at the release window of the movie, with a full year left, and then ordered a single reshoot to kill Leia off instead of pulling a Space Merry Poppins.
He also completely abandoned Finn's Force potential in favor of whatever the fuck that casino raid was.
And then there was the noble sacrifice that Finn was going to make, which was foiled because he decided that Finn should have a love interest, but didn't lay any of the groundwork for it, and the sacrifice could have actually saved the day.
So instead, he invents the hyperspace kamikaze.
Honestly, that entire movie felt like a long filler sequence. The stakes never actually changed, and there was no payoff of anything. It was a placeholder movie, only meant to be the second in a trilogy. And the fans hated it so much that the last movie spent a good amount of runtime retconning it all.
There's also him taking the whole buildup of Snoke as the big bad and then turning him into just some dude who dies right after being encountered.
Then, he turns out to be a clone remotely controlled because...
The Extended Universe (which Disney rightfully expunged from canon) actually explained Palpatine's return quite well.
And yes, it was cloning. Palpatine cloned himself a bunch of times, and used the dark side of the force to body hop to a new clone when the old one wore out. Which they did at an accelerated pace due to the corrupting influence of the dark side.
That was the original reason why Vader was more machine than man, because the Dark side, for all its power, was literally stripping the life out of them.
Then Lucas came along with the prequels and decided, no, the dark side isn't some corrosive thing, it's just the force being used by mean people.
I mean, seriously? What difference is there between the light side and the dark side when you watch the movies? Seems to be none. Just that the dark side is fueled by emotion? That it? Okay then.
Worse than that- in the prequels, the Jedi were pretty fucking awful too. They propped up the corrupt Old Republic and what they did with children was just inexcusable, so if they represented the light side of the force, the light side isn't that much better than the dark side, if better at all.
And if it's all so morally ambiguous, why does The Force have two sides to it?
Worse than that- in the prequels, the Jedi were pretty fucking awful too.
Well ya. That WAS the point. Anakin literally said "from my point of view the Jedi are evil", and it's because the Jedi completely lost what it meant to find balance with the force.
And the Force has two sides because it has two opposing, but directly related aspects. Like positive and negative charges, or light and dark (in the conceptual sense). How can you tell the light without darkness?
IIRC, this is something the EU had explored with Luke. He approaches his New Jedi Order with a balanced mindset of the Force.
Yep, that's basically what Ashoka became in the new show from what I've read about it (I haven't watched it though)
Starting to become, hasn't quite become just yet.
If you have to go into expanded universe stories to understand why something that doesn't seem to make sense actually makes sense, you failed as a filmmaker.
Tell that to the sequel trilogy writers.
But as for the prequels, you didn't need to get into the expanded universe for that. The main story arc was well served with what we got. The other stuff is just for us nerds to dig into the lore.
Snoke should've been Jar Jar Binks.
Which could have been a good twist, but instead it was a wet turd in a sea of sUbVeRtInG eXpEcTaTiOnS
This take assumes all of this was his decision and not the studio with billions sunk into a franchise they were desperate to milk.
Look at his other movies, like Brick or Knives Out, he can direct a movie to fucking greatness. And he is committed to writing AND directing so the only way those ham fisted bullshit narrative loopholes could find their way into his movie is if it was put there by studio interference. I agree that he had a couple of bad ideas which changed the physics of Star Wars, showing a misunderstanding of the material, but he was always a film nerd who loved Star Wars for its technical innovations and story telling techniques and not a committed fan who loved the universe.
Rian Johnson is a good director who had uncharacteristic ideas in his one big studio movie that didn't fit his normal output.
The thing is- Brick and Knives Out are not sci-fi. It takes a certain kind of person to do sci-fi properly and it wasn't him. Norman Jewison was a great director, but I wouldn't call Rollerball an amazing piece of science fiction. Robert Altman's only science fiction film, Quintet, was rightfully a flop because it was awful. Howard Hawks was an incredible director, but The Thing from Another World, his only science fiction movie, is pretty darn cheesy.
All three men were very talented, but none of them really understood sci-fi.
He did direct Looper though, which is top tier sci-fi.
6 movies that tell the rise, fall, and redemption of the Skywalker family just for 3 more movies to have them stumble, fall again, die out, and ultimately have the galaxy be saved by the big bad’s grand daughter who came out of no where, but it’s ok, she’s a Skywalker in spirit 🤷♂️
Late-stage capitalism sucks donkey balls. There's nothing at all wrong with money, but to chase after it to the exclusion of all else... is not so good. :-(
Chasing short term profits undermines the possibility of building a brand on quality beyond the expansion and buyout phase. So many companies that were known for making quality products with quality service were bought out and run into the ground as shadows of their former selves after being bought out by investment firms that wanted the name and reputation but not the actual production and support costs that the brand was built on.
It's parasitism - they latch onto something successful, then as you said run it into the ground, then leave it to someone else to deal with the mess. It is SO MUCH HARDER to build something as a mutualistic symbiosis, hence it's easier if they just... don't.:-(
It's hard to look at something like Looper or Knives Out and say Rian Johnson is a bad storyteller. He fucked up The Last Jedi and owns that in interviews, but you're doing yourself a disservice if you're writing him off completely.
A lot of that criticism though also comes from Abrams and his decision to just not use anything from TLJ. It wouldn't have felt like placeholder or filler if the liberated casino planet came back in RoS as a major ally, or if Luke's force ghost continued to teach Rey, etc. It's like if RotJ ignored the ESB and said Vader actually wasn't Luke's father and Han broke out offscreen and Lando wasn't ever seen again.
I meant that J J Abrams has done some good work as well, like Fringe and Lost and Cloverfield.
Here is the best description of J.J. Abrams:
He is able to tell a really good cliffhanger.
Give him a single project. Super 8? Cloverfield? The Pilot of Lost?
It's hard to deny their merits. But then he's given projects like Star Trek, which he used to show he could make a Star Wars movie. Then he got Star Wars and eased into it by retelling A New Hope and abandoned it.
How do you figure that?