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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   6567 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 17, 2025

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You know what movie I'm kind of coming around to? The Last Jedi.

I know, I know, it's a terrible Star Wars movie, for all the reasons laid out eloquently by acoup.It's jokey when it should have been serious, it completely screws up both Stars Wars lore and actual military stuff, and it's a weird convoluted mess of a plot. None of the new characters are likeable, and it makes us retroactively dislike the old characters too.

But.... maybe that was the point. Maybe the movie did exactly what it said it would do in the title... it killed the jedis. Permanently. It's the last of them.

Imagine that you're Rian Johnson. You're not someone like Michael Bay or JJ Abrams who can endlessly churn out fun blockbusters. You're an "autor" director, who takes himself very seriously and writes all your own movies. Also, you're relatively young in your career, having made a grand total of 3 movies (all rather low budget) before being suddenly handed the reins to Star Wars. You've obviously heard of Star Wars, but you were never a big fan, and you've spent your entire filmmaking career under its shadow. Your personal inspiration for getting into filmmaking was Annie Hall, a weird surreal comedy movie that came out the same year as original Star Wars but is about as different as it's possible to get.

What do you do with this thing? The eyes of the entire world were suddenly focused on you. You know basically what they expect, of course- a fun blockbuster movie that's basically a soft reboot of Empire. You could do that. But that's boring- it's been done before.

I think what he did was to take it in a very "meta" direction. It's not really a Star Wars movie at all, it's a movie about the relationship that Star Wars has with its fans. Specifically the most obsessed, hardcore fanboys who have been rewatching the same few movies over and over for almost 50 years now while mindlessly consuming all the new products. I think he wanted to scream "get a life" at them like William Shatner. I also think he wanted to sabotage it a bit, to stop the Disney Empire from endlessly remaking this one silly movie from the 70s for all time. (part of the reason the original is so good is that it's a remarkably short and self-contained story- it was hard even for them to stretch it into a trilogy, and it really shows the cracks when you try to stretch it any further than that)

This movie is almost a parody of Star Wars, a much darker and more brutal parody than Space Balls. It starts by completely throwing logic out the window by showing a space battle with gravity to drop bombs from the world's slowest bombers. Then it portrays Leia as some sort of coward who tries to cancel the mission at the last minute when it's obviously correct for them to go for it. I believe this is intentional, to make us realize that Star Wars was always silly Space Opera and really should not be taken seriously by anyone. There's certainly no reason to think that "Princess" Leia was any sort of great military leader. She was originally just a damsel in distress, waiting to be rescued. Why should anyone be taking orders from her?

In a similar vein, I think Holdo was supposed to be incompetent. Why are all the rebel leaders in Star Wars so good at their jobs? Real militaries are full of idiots who get their jobs through political connections, and rebel forces even more so. Her strange appearance ("admiral purple hair") also suggests this. The movie is just being realistic here- an incompetent person is placed in high rank for political reasons ("the force is female!") and disaster ensues. That's actually a realistic and interesting story, it's just not the one we expected from Star Wars. It's essentially a comedy of errors.

Then there's all the Jedi stuff with Luke, Ray, and Kylo Ren. Here's where I think the movie really finds its mark. I remember a time not too long ago when "Jediism" was being taken semi-seriously by some people as a philosophy. The original movies made the Jedi look so cool and wise. But this movie just savages them. Luke is this weird, disgusting old man who has completely given up on everything. Ray is a silly, naive little girl who's constantly falling for everyone's tricks. Kylo Ren murders his own leader for basically no reason at all. Yoda makes a brief cameo just to use force lightning (!?) to burn down all the sacred Jedi texts, before literally telling us "time it is for you to look past a pile of old books." All of them completely fail at actually doing anything to affect the larger war going on- the resistance is mostly wiped out by regular guns.

I think this was done very artfully and intentionally to kill the Jedi. It's not easy to kill off a fictional character- as the next movie showed, you can always write in some excuse to bring them back to life. Even actors can now be brought back from beyond the grave by digital technology. But when you make both the Jedi and the Sith look, not just incompetent, but disgustingly, stupidly incompetent- it really turns the fans against them. It makes the producers not want to bring the dead characters back, which is what really matters.

A lot of people have criticized it for leaving nowhere for the next movie to go. All the plot beats from The Force Awakened were tossed aside, a lot of the main characters were dead, and the ones left alive no longer looked like heroes. I think that was the point. This is not a story that should be turned into an endless series of blockbuster movies. There's no where good for it to go, and it's unhealthy to just wallow in nostalgia. I feel like people have largely forgotten about The Rise of Skywalker by this point (what a bland, forgettable movie), but they definitely will remember The Last Jedi. The https://old.reddit.com/r/saltierthankrayt/ subreddit to hate on it is still, to this day, surprisingly active! People really hate this movie! (edit- I meant https://old.reddit.com/r/saltierthancrait/ but it's kind of funny that there's another active subreddit just to hate on that one, and at first glance I couldn't even tell the difference)

If I'm right, I think Rian Johnson pulled off one of the all-time greatest troll jobs in history. He got Disney to pay him to make a movie that didn't just parody its biggest brand, but made even its biggest fanboys realize some of it is. I feel like it used to be somewhat cool for everyone to like Star Wars. Or you could use it in an ironic way like the unipiper. I don't see any of that anymore. As Mr Plinkett tells us, Disney is cranking out Star Wars content for TV now, going in all sorts of crazy directions, but no one is paying attention. It just doesn't have the cultural relevance it once did. Harrison Ford might have spent much of his life grumbling about how he dislikes obsessive fans, but he still kept it going. Rian Johnson was the one man who could actually kill this franchise and save us from an eternity of shitty corporate nostalgia and soft reboots.

And then that stops when you ask them $15 for a ticket.

I mean, he was highly successful at killing the love for one of the major cultural touchstones of cinema, if that was his goal. But I highly doubt that was the goal of the multi-billion dollar media corporation that signs his paycheck.

I think the problem with the sequel trilogy is that it ignores the basic rule of collaborative storytelling: never say No, say Yes And.

At core, all fantasy is cooperative storytelling between the author and the audience. Even the most encyclopedic fantasy worlds can never be fully fleshed out, the author always needs the audience to imagine the rest of the world as existing, and much of the joy comes from that kind of space for imagination. Boys love having that space for imagination to expand. Middle-Earth offers you vast vistas hinting at a world where the audience can imagine many other things happenings. 40k is the logical conclusion of this method: the whole galaxy is nothing but Yes And: yes there are Orcs and yes there are Elves and yes there are evil robots and yes there are terrifying psychic chaos demons and yes there is a giant bio-engineered fleet of bugs that are more dangerous than all the rest put together and yes there are vaguely anime inflected communist aliens and yes there are genetically perfect superhumans who can dual wield artillery.

Star Wars at first did the same in the OT and PT. ANH sets things in motion, and with each movie things just get bigger. The PT takes every idea in the OT and expands it.

The sequels are all No. They are No, not at all. Every question a viewer might have from prior movies is answered with "No, not really." No, the Republic wasn't refounded, not really, and it wasn't any good anyway. No, the Jedi order wasn't reformed, not for long, and it fell apart again instantly. No, the Empire wasn't defeated, not really. Even down to no, Han and Leia didn't stay in love.

The whole worldview of the movie is fundamentally negative and hopeless. It leaves no room for the viewer to imagine, and it leaves no room for collaborative storytelling to keep the universe growing.

So I guess I agree with you in concept, but I don't think it's any great feat. Anyone could have made garbage.

You’re forgetting something.

TLJ was written in 2015 and rewritten in early 2016. This was circa season 5 of Game of Thrones. Subverting Expectations™ had never been more popular. Johnson wanted to make a twisty movie because he thought it would be good. If you don’t believe me, look at this interview.

So that really is where it all stemmed from.  It was thinking about Kylo's path, thinking about where I wanted him to be at the end of the movie to set him up for the next film.  And thinking okay, that means we're gonna clear away this slightly more familiar dynamic of the Emperor and the pupil.  Clear the boards from that, and then that's much more exciting going into [Episode IX], the notion of now we just have Kylo as the one that they have to deal with.

Hilarious in hindsight, sure, but not at all what you’d expect from someone trying to salt the earth. He knew, by this point, that he wasn’t writing or directing the next movie. Dude just didn’t want to remake ESB or RotJ. Hence Luke contrasted with Yoda. Kylo with Vader. Snoke with the Emperor. None of the scenes which call back to the OT play out the same way.

This is…actually a good idea? It’s crucial to a lot of high-quality sequels and reboots. Take the initial conditions and play with them. Invite viewers to jump in and out of the original mindset. I could derail into all sorts of examples from comics to anime; deconstruction is popular for a reason, especially among outsiders. Auteurs.

Rian Johnson was not hired to play that auteur. He certainly wasn’t given free rein to redefine canon. I’d say the game was rigged from the start, but the January ‘16 rewrites suggest otherwise.

(As an aside, the production timelines for these films are absolutely insane. Trevorrow was hired for RoS before TFA even released. What fraction of those TLJ rewrites was a response to TFA’s mediocre foreign performance?)

Point is, the movie we saw was thoroughly made by committee. All the stakeholders got something by sacrificing, well, the fundamentals of plot and likeable characters. You’re not seeing Johnson’s devious plan to disarm the franchise. You’re seeing his team’s attempt to ride the deconstruction bandwagon.

That's fair. It's not like I can read Rian Johnson's mind and see what he was thinking, and of course other stakeholders also had input. I kind of think it doesn't matter though- whatever his intentions were at the time, he ended up making a movie that brutally deconstructed Star Wars much worse than any parody ever could.

This is…actually a good idea?

It's neither good nor bad, how it pans out is about execution, not the idea itself, and the execution was hot garbage. Half of the internet autist reeing at the TLJ was pointing out how they could do deconstruction / subversion properly, if that's what they were aiming for.

I will die on the hill that it would have been a vastly better trilogy and truly subverted expectations if they had had the balls to have Kylo and Rey flip sides in the throne room confrontation. Rey was already an amazing Dragon, while Kylo always seemed to be playacting to get one of his father figures attention.

Daisy Ridley is maybe a touch too much younger than Adam Driver for my idea, but with different casting could have just copy-pasted the idea of Revan from Kotor. Rey was the one who seduced Ben Solo to the dark side, they destroyed Luke's Jedi Academy together and killed Mara Jade, Luke's best way of dealing with her when he beat her and drove off Kylo Ren was brainwashing her and dumping her on Jakku 10 minutes away from Han Solo. Also I'd just make Rey an XX-clone of Palpatine and Snoke a defective clone.

Absolutely.

Watching the Darth Vader LARPer wake the fuck up? Adam Driver totally could have sold it.

Yep.

There were like 50 ways they could have taken Rey's character to make the trilogy interesting and unique.

I distinctly recall talking to my friend after watching The Force Awakens and saying "I think they made Rey too perfect, but I am curious to learn about her background and I'm willing to see if they do anything fun with her." And they just drove her deeper into Mary-Suesville.

Having her turn in the second film would also suit the general "the good guys lose" trend of the second movies in the trilogy. And if they want to keep the circle of important characters small, then obviously have Finn be the one who either redeems her and/or kills her in the third.

Building up one character as an Overpowered prodigy to then have her flip to the bad side is a great way to raise stakes.

Likewise, one idea I've had floating around was... if you wanted to give Leia force powers, then why not have her whip out force lightning at some point in the film. A power that is universally associated with the bad guys, and Leia can use it, but maybe only under extreme stress or something. You can subvert expectations without just dumping on the actual work itself.

Building up one character as an Overpowered prodigy to then have her flip to the bad side is a great way to raise stakes.

"Mary-Sue but evil" does sound fun -- I can't think of it having been done, in fact?

In a mainstream story, not a ton, and most of the cases I can think of it's at least arguable that the writer believed the character to be a hero or 'conflicted', all evidence to the contrary aside. For a male example, Aizen from Bleach (not recommended) or Jacen Solo from __ or Anton Chigurh from No Country For Old Men for a more entertaining version; for female ones, Kreia from KOTOR2 is probably the best-known among readers here, most others usually fall around into genres (romantasy and college drama stuff).

Actual Mary Sue turns evil stories are rarer. Kreia and Jacen fit, but only marginally.

Stories where a powerful Chosen One ends up turning to the Dark Side -- without being flat characters that wrap the story around themselves -- are a little more common, but usually different, not least of all that they typically have the actual protagonist take the center of the narrative away from them. Tai Lung from Kung Fu Panda, Dylan from Control. Arguably Wanda from the DCAU kinda straddles these two positions, but she's a pretty unusual case.

Fanfiction, everywhere. Quirrelmort from HPMOR was pretty overtly intended as a send-up of the concept, and succeeded so aggressively that even after the story's conclusion a lot of people didn't get the joke, but original characters, Draco, Hermoine, or Harry made far more competent (or faced off against dumber authorities) taking out their frustrations on random characters or fictionalized versions of real-world targets happened a lot. MLP had Gilda, Trixie, and Princess Celestia as pretty common go-tos, Transformer fandom's got a lot of people who love the Decepticons, yada yada. They're not always Sues, but they tend to be less considered stories, so not a surprise that they're common.

I admittedly have never heard of Kreia described as a 'Mary Sue'.

I've heard of alot of people dislike her, but never call her a Mary Sue.

I would argue that this was almost the story of Anakin Skywalker.

Anakin's, um... a boy though?

That just means we get to argue about whether it's funnier to call him a "Marty Stu" or a "Gary Stu".

Assuming we argue here, that is. I guessed that TVTropes would have something about how "Mary Sue Tropes are too contentious to provide specific examples", but AllTheTropes was supposed to be the "We're not interested in Censorship", "Debate is Encouraged" fork and even there it's "No examples, please; Mary Sue Tropes are by their nature YMMV Tropes, and we don't need the flamewars."

AllTheTropes has no real activity. It's basically just a snapshot of TVTropes as it existed in 2013.

"Competent and dangerous dude takes a heel turn" is a pretty well established (if not exactly common) trope though -- see, um -- Magneto, off the top of my head?

With women, I don't think I've seen it.

Ah, I get it - it's that combination of both tropes for that gender you've never seen before? That does get much harder! Two out of three, sure, but...

Personally I wouldn't even count Magneto, since IMHO a key part of the Mary Sue / Marty Stu concept is that they're a viewpoint character that audiences are expected to become invested in, not just a side character. Maybe I'm just ignorant of the comics, but at least in the movies Magneto always seemed to be a deuteragonist foil for Xavier at best. That "can't just be a side character" rule also rules out a couple female examples I've seen in video games, and maybe one from TV.

I think Daenrys Targaryen might be the only example I can come up with! And ... maybe that's the exception that proves the rule? I think the real underlying reason for everyone's disappointment with the Game of Thrones final season was the low quality of the execution once the showrunners no longer had books to work from, but one of the biggest explicit complaints was the way the story turned so many people's favorite Savior character into another villain. Is that a gendered thing, or would people have been equally pissed about Anakin if they hadn't known it was coming?

they actually did that in Rise of Skywalker, with Rey using force lightning semi-accidentally (to not-kill Chewbacca)

Yeah I could get behind that. I would even ship them as a couple. I think that would have hilarious for what a shit storm it would have caused Disney, but the actors had real chemistry together. After they separated it was like... wait, what is even the point of either of these two characters?

I haven't seen episode 8, I only read the plot summary to prepare myself for 9. So I have no view on how well handled it was, but I like the idea of the turn, marry me, and rule alongside me proposal. It's an interesting way of reprising Vader's offer to Luke.

It was handled... strangely. Almost like some 70s B movie. Kylo and Ray have some mystical soul connection which is never explained. There's a bunch of scenes of him unnecessarily shirtless, and Ray obviously pining for him like a lovestruck teen girl.

Then she's suddenly like "nope! Changed my mind!" And flies away on her own. It felt to me like the writers and actors all really wanted this romance to happen, but the producers stepped in to cancel it. But im just wildly speculating. I hope someone makes a documentary about the making of this movie someday.

Imagine if they'd gone the opposite direction. The climax of the movie could be a big, sweaty, BDSM themed sex scene between Ray-Lo. Both the boomers who want a girlboss, and the zoomers who hate sex in movies, would be totally freaked out. People would be talking about it forever. A forbidden love story for the ages.

(You might notice that I have very weird taste in movies)

Rian Johnson definitely exhibited a gigglesneering contempt for the existing audience, but I'd doubt that this was mostly about trying to wake people up to how star wars was always dumb. The trolling theory needs to also incorporate that Johnson literally inserted deliberate random 'mansplaining' and 'manterrupting'/'bropropriating' scenes in TLJ with no narrative purpose, from Poe & Finn against new female characters (so it wasn't just Luke he wanted to take down a peg).

To anyone who missed it, this kind of stuff was in the air from ~2015 era inane 'white feminist' complaints, before feminism went intersectional which was found to be a sturdier shield against mockery. RJ slightly missed that timing by the time TLJ came out, so it was doubly embarrassing to put this inappropriate 'chud-owning' in a giant-budget star wars blockbuster.

edit: actually found the manterrupting clip, from the plinkett review

It's a bit of a digression, but I found it funny (and admittedly unsurprising) for acoup to say that he thinks the story would be improved by making admiral purple hair uncontroversially competent and Poe incompetent UNTIL he realizes his error of not listening to his female superiors. That's an extremely sanctimonious and unfun storyline (sexist to boot, though who cares if it's this way around?) and I wouldn't be surprised in the least if that was the original intention, but was scrapped on contact with focus groups to make it more fun.

It’s a fix because “hothead learns to respect the bigger picture” is a Star Wars narrative in a way that “young prodigy becomes cowed by failure” is not. The latter is less fun and even more sanctimonious.

Like, imagine if Luke’s response to losing his hand was “huh, I guess Yoda was right,” and then he goes back to Tatooine for the rest of his life. Lame!

The proposed story there is actually "Poe learns to listen to his superiors, who got there by being good at their jobs". You could tell that story in a sanctimonious way (and evidence suggests that Johnson may well have done so), but it isn't inherently so. A hothead young guy having to learn to listen to the wise older mentors is a pretty old and respectable story trope.

This is weird because Poe really isnt that young. He was uh (looks up dates) played by a 38 year old actor when TLJ came out? Plus he was already a main character in TFA, and that movie made it a point to show he was already a character with experience, just like han in the original movie.

It really comes across the opposite way. The older, higher ranking officer expects blind obediance. Poe is clearly correct, but she wont listen to him because he didn't have enough stars on his uniform. The only solution is mutiny

Poe is, what, a O-4+? Rank in Star Wars is fucking ridiculous, seems to go lieutenant-captain-commander-major-colonel-flag ranks. Rank titles are based on how cool they are and the jump from captain to commander in Star Wars seems to be Captain-Major in real life, and Colonel is "highest field rank" while Majors mean nothing in the show.

In any case pre-demotion Poe would absolutely have had pull to request clarification of operational details from the OIC (I'm sure Vice-Admiral is Star Wars speak for 2nd highest dlag, but Admiral for a "fleet" of like 6 is fucking pathetic). Rank doesn't stop a shit order from being shit and grunts do expect more than "just do it" because clarifying objectives is what lets NCOs or field officers be flexible in fulfilling the task instead of rushing to wait. Holdo is a shittily written character who had no reason to hold out her (stupid) plan, and that whole space siege was definitely the worst part of the movie even without this weird slapdown of a dickwaving session.

I mean, the ACOUP blog agrees with you that as written in the movie, Poe is correct. That's why he says the story is badly written. But that would not be the case in his hypothetical alternate version of the story, so I don't think "but Poe was right" is a valid criticism of the blog's idea.

In addition to not fitting the genre, that storyline makes Admiral Purple Hair either the protagonist or the Obi-wan style mentor, so it would have had to have been a very different movie (thought her ending still works)

I am a huge fan of Expanded Universe, which also killed Star Wars in many other ways. There were many other interesting expansions, the most famous being that of admiral Thrawn painting the Empire in slightly better way and subverting the movie narratives a little bit. Then there was now non-canonic Yuuzhan Vong War, which made the post Empire republic look stupid, partly vindicating the Empire as they would have been able to deal with that out of galaxy invasion much more efficiently with their technology of star destroyers and Death Stars. And of course there were several force users, who claimed that there was not Dark or Light side and that the force is just a tool to be used for good. An interesting idea which was developed quite a lot in EU and which produced some Sith Lords and light masters questioning the dichotomy between the force sides.

The main thing going against The Last Jedi is not that it destroyed the themes in the original movies, but that it was just shit. The fandom would jump on other perspectives or even non-canonical things happening - if they were good.

which made the post Empire republic look stupid, partly vindicating the Empire

I feel like that's a recurring problem in Star Wars. The original gets away with handwaving it away like "now we suffer under an evil empire, but once we had a glorious republic!" But every time it actually shows the details, the republic seems to be completely feeble and inept, while the Empire can at least make the trains run on time defend its people against alien threats. Like, in the Phantom Menace, it seems that slavery is openly practiced on some worlds and the Republic just doesn't give a shit.

Something that always gave me pause in A New Hope in the officer meeting where Vader chokes the guy while saying "I find your lack of faith disturbing", is the way the Empire got rid of the last vestiges of the old republic. According to Tarkin, regional governors are taking over for the republic bureaucracy.

If we ignore the big villain energy he adds with the whole "fear" line, the change sounds... positive to me? In my mind an evil empire would be centralizing power, not decentralizing it. Bureaucracy is at the very best a necessary evil, usually closer to evil than to necessary.

Ultimately, the way things shake out in the prequel trilogy, I find myself rooting against the republic. Fighting separatists? Separatists are people who don't WANT to be in your republic, crushing them puts you on the side of meddling interventionist empires, not freedom fighters.

I mean, I don't literally root against the republic, because since it's work of fiction, it's written so all the cool people are that side, and all the kitten stranglers are on the other. But if you were describe to me in neutral terms with no loaded language and no villain speech about fear the political systems in the Star Wars universe, I don't think I would identify the good guys and the bad guys the way Lucas and Disney seem to think I would.

the change sounds... positive to me?

A regional governor isn't a guy you elect locally to represent his home region, it's a guy hand-picked by the central ruler to control his assigned region. Think Lord Cornbury, not George Washington. It's a form of centralization.

Ultimately, the way things shake out in the prequel trilogy, I find myself rooting against the republic. Fighting separatists? Separatists are people who don't WANT to be in your republic, crushing them puts you on the side of meddling interventionist empires, not freedom fighters.

This, on the other hand, is part of my headcanon too. The separatists are clearly assholes, but they're also just the second-to-last of the series of puppets that Palpatine has been using to manufacture crises and accrue power, and at this stage of his plan the way to avoid such a trap would simply be to not walk into it. I'm honestly not sure whether this was a brilliant decision by Lucas (showing that the physical downfall of the Jedi was a consequence of their moral downfall, that they were all as prone to paranoid attachment and jealousy as Anakin, but for power and control and stability rather than for love) or a lucky-but-ignorant decision by Lucas (thoughtlessly internalizing a false lesson of the US Civil War, the idea that because separatism for an evil cause is evil, separatism can simply be assumed to be inherently evil), but it worked.

The Empire basically never defends its people. Sometimes it actively sells them out. This is because the Empire doesn’t really have people. It has subjects, measured only by their value to the Emperor.

It might be more accurate to compare the New Republic to Imperial splinter warlords (Zsinj, Isard) or to Pellaeon’s Imperial Remnant. None of those have a great track record vs. alien interlopers or even each other.

In The Phantom Menace, it seems that slavery is openly practiced on some worlds and the Republic just doesn't give a shit.

The opening crawl for that movie explicitly states: "The taxation of trade routes to outlying star systems is in dispute." Naboo is an outlying star system. Tatooine is even more distant from the capital than Naboo—possibly not even part of the Republic, as indicated by how Watto refuses to take Republic credits. These two systems are not representative of a "glorious republic", any more than Moldova and Transnistria are representative of Europe.

I'm far from convinced that TLJ was what actually killed Star Wars. For my money TLJ is easily the best of the Sequel Trilogy, though I admit that is a low bar. The Force Awakens had a positive reception at the time, but that reception was based almost entirely on hype, and as time has passed, I think audiences have cooled on TFA and have mostly come around to realising that it's bad. And, of course, The Rise of Skywalker was obviously garbage from the moment it hit theatres - I have never seen anybody, even the most devoted of fans, try to defend that mess.

My sense is that Rian Johnson made an attempt to cook a meal with the ingredients he was given, and while the result was kind of crap, it was, given what he was working with, about as good as could have been expected. J. J. Abrams did more to make more Star Wars impossible, and the profusion of forgettable Disney TV slop only did more to undermine the brand.

I agree that Star Wars is functionally dead now, but I think that death began with the Disney acquisition, its first signs were evident with TFA, and then by RoS it was too obvious for anyone to deny. TLJ is a bad film. But it is not as bad as either its predecessor or its successor, and while it took part in the franchise-killing Sequel Trilogy, I don't think it can be accused of either the first or the last blow in that killing.

I agree that Star Wars is functionally dead now

Andor was legitimately great, and managed to make the already-fantastic Rogue One movie even better in retrospect.

I wouldn't count out star wars just yet. I think there's some small but nonzero chance that a good sequel-sequel trilogy could be made, on the conditions that it be managed by a single visionary director that loves the aesthetics and themes of the star wars series without being beholden beholden to a committee or pandering to existing fans. Or, shooting smaller, I think if the upcoming harry potter reboot TV show ends up working out, I could easily imagine a complete star wars TV series reboot to essentially re-tell the entire story, but with judicious editing, so that all the incoherent and terrible-in-retrospect parts get smoothed out.

That might seem overly hopeful, because 9 movies worth of events (plus however much background detail they want to add) is a lot to coherently condense, but I think advancements in AI will massively reduce the labor of making creative work, and as a consequence multiply the effectiveness of auteur geniuses. Where before all of an artists vision and wisdom could be poured to fill a trilogy, at best, AI might soon be able to spread that effort across a much longer period, like an upscaling algorithm applied to the problem of getting "twenty years to write book 1, and one extra to write book 2."

Eh, I haven't seen Andor, but I'd describe Rogue One as both the best of the Disney films and an extremely forgettable, mediocre outing. There's just very little in Rogue One to like, I find? It has some pretty space battles if CGI spaceships blowing each other up does it for you, I guess.

You are much more optimistic about AI than I would be. I'm afraid I consider AI an unmitigated disaster for creative industries.

and while the result was kind of crap, it was, given what he was working with, about as good as could have been expected.

I don’t believe this. There were plenty of promising avenues to develop upon TFA.

  1. Snoke. This was the mystery box I was most excited to open. They should have just made him Darth Plagueis. You could even bring back Ian Mcdiarmid for a flashback scene in Episode IX if you had to.

  2. The New Republic. We could have fleshed-out the backstory to the First Order. Maybe our heroes meet up with a surviving Republic admiral and we get themes of confronting evil when one has the chance.

  3. Rey’s backstory. Snoke has a great line in the movie: “Darkness rises, and light to meet it.” Maybe the force wants to be balanced? This would be a great tie-in to

  4. Luke’s current situation and arc. I’m okay with the basic setup here, but it needed to be executed better.

My sense is that Rian Johnson made an attempt to cook a meal with the ingredients he was given, and while the result was kind of crap, it was, given what he was working with, about as good as could have been expected.

Literally reversing the roles of Johnson and Abrams in what actually happened. TFA wasn't that good, but it wasn't bad either, they could have gone anywhere with it. The idea that TLJ was "as good as could have been expected, given what he was working with" is pure cope. If they handed it off to any decent manga / anime writer, Disney would probably have their cash cow that they could milk for another generation

It was The Rise Of Skywalker that was an attempt to cook given the ingredients. Yes, it sucked and no one sane will defend it, but it's a direct result of Johnson spending the entire second act wrecking what was set up in the first, and handing it back saying "ok, you can finish the story now".

TFA wasn't cooked, it was reheated moldy original trilogy. TLJ was cooked, but it felt like a joke meal, like a kid put toothpaste and jellybeans in a steak dinner. And yeah, TRS was essentially doomed, the only thing that could have saved it was starting with Rey waking up in her bed "Whew, what a weird nightmare that was! Thankfully, it was all a dream!"

Agree that TFA is reheated leftover memberberry slop. It hits the familiar notes one needs but did nothing new and reverting to "plucky rebels vs big bad evil" is a stupid move. Breaking out of the narrative confines of Empire Vs Rebel is what would allow new factions with new starships and uniforms to pop up and drive the toy empire that Star Wars really is. You need new cool outfits for heroes and bad guys both, and cool ships.

TLJ however is I would defend as good in concept but fucked entirely in execution. Wiping the slate clean is a Bold move, but it didn't actually wipe it clean enough and was so badly done Disney scrambled for a recovery in the memberberry double-down of TROS. All of that means the Star Wars aesthetic is suck with "dull desert robes" or "stormtrooper". No one is cosplaying Admiral Holdo, but thats also because Rian Johnson apparently told his costume director to make her (and Rose) neither sexy nor intimidating but still feminine which is a fucking insane combo for someone meant to be a goddamn military leader. Not even a fucking collar to cover up her expose nape, where the fuck do you put rank pins on that grandma ballgown.

Eh, I feel like that reading could only make sense if The Force Awakens by itself was a tolerably good film, and it just isn't. TFA already sucked. Maybe you think TLJ made it worse, but I really don't think TFA is defensible on its own merits.

TFA didn't feel offensive on release, because it smelled enough like Star Wars at first glance. It took hindsight to see it has no substance, no nutrients in it. I literally don't remember what happens in it at all.

It took hindsight to see it has no substance, no nutrients in it.

Shouldn't that have been expected with J.J. Abrams though?

Yeah I walked out of the theater having enjoyed TFA. It was only after that it occurred to me that it was a beat-for-beat copy of episode 4, which killed my ability to enjoy it.

TFA is a mediocre Star Wars film. TLJ essentially derailed the whole trajectory though

TFA wasn't good, by any stretch of the imagination, but it mostly avoided being an active dumpster fire. It was a lazy, uninspired mess, and if it had any brand name other than Star Wars it would have been quickly forgotten, but not particularly hated. TLJ was an active dumpster fire, and I've always been a bit curious about the thinking of the people who look at the actively burning dumpster fire, smell the trash fire, taste the toxic ash on the wind, and go "Mmmm, yes. Art."

It always seems like counter-signaling.

Well, I'd agree that there's a level of counter-signalling in the critical love for TLJ, or at least, automatic contrarianism to a fanbase perceived as stupid, entitled, and so on.

Where I disagree is with the suggestion that TFA was anything other than an active dumpster fire in its own right. To be as clear as possible, I don't think TLJ is good. TLJ is a bad film. I just think that TLJ is the least bad of the sequels. The fact that TLJ is as bad as it is while also being the least bad of the sequels says something truly dire about the other two, and that's the point I'd argue more fiercely.

, I feel like that reading could only make sense if The Force Awakens by itself was a tolerably good film

Why?

You have two whole acts of the story to play with, characters that can fit into standard archetypes that you can develop as you please, a mysterious villain that you can take in any direction you want... Even if we accept that TFA is horrible beyond human comprehension, there is nothing in it that prevents the next episode from being good. This is in stark contrast to TLJ which does fuck everything up for anyone writing the final act.

I mean, I do find TFA near-unwatchably bad, but I'll grant that maybe I have an unusual hatred for it. But I think that if your contention is that TLJ is to blame because it didn't radically swerve course and reinvent the whole ST, then that still seems like a position where a lot of blame would unavoidably fall on TFA for contributing so little to the trilogy that the second film had to reinvent it from scratch.

Considering that TFA was an Abrams contribution, and the universally-despised RoS is also an Abrams contribution - could even a hypothetically perfect TLJ have rescued the trilogy beyond even Abrams' ability to screw up in the third act? I doubt it.

But I think that if your contention is that TLJ is to blame because it didn't radically swerve course and reinvent the whole ST

What are you talking about, there was hardly any ST to reinvent. Just tell a normal story and do it well, stop trying to be original and "subversive".

I brought up manga and anime because the Japanese got so good at getting people emotionally invested into characters and showing their development through a series of flashy fights, it's like they got it down to a science. Yeah, yeah, pseudointellectuals will complain about how derivative it all is and has nothing that deep to say, and I will remind them that we're talking about Star Wars. We're aiming for a not-that-deep but fun adventure that everyone can enjoy watching.

The whole problem with TLJ is that it did try to swerve course... onto a wall. With what it did there was no way for part 3 to be anything other than a disaster, which was not the case after TFA.

Considering that TFA was an Abrams contribution, and the universally-despised RoS is also an Abrams contribution - could even a hypothetically perfect TLJ have rescued the trilogy beyond even Abrams' ability to screw up in the third act? I doubt it.

There was nothing to rescue from post TFA. All the pieces are still on the board minus Han Solo, you can literally do whatever you want. After TLJ not only are Luke and Leia gone, so are the majoroty of the Republic forces, and so is Snoke. Ren was not main villain material and you don't have the time to develop him into one. What the hell were they supposed to do? I low-key hate Abrams, but it's ridiculous to put the blame on him.

I actually think that TLJ itself is extremely derivative and not deep. Critics who said that it was were, in my opinion, engaging in, if not cope, then I think a type of reflexive disagreement with fans. TLJ is mostly a by-the-numbers retread of ESB, in the same way that TFA was a by-the-numbers retread of ANH. You have the desperate flight from the Empire, bickering on a spaceship in an extended escape sequence, an excursion to a corrupt world run by shady businessmen, the protagonist being disappointed and challenged by a cranky old Jedi Master living in exile, a dramatic showdown between protagonist and central villain in which the villain reveals a horrible secret about the protagonist's past, and then the movie's conclusion is the heroes just barely managing to escape and regroup. TLJ isn't a swerve - it's the same damn thing as TFA.

The people hailing it as a clever subversion or deconstruction of Star Wars were mostly people illiterate in the wider Star Wars canon and therefore ignorant of the many superior deconstruction stories already in the franchise.

The points are good but I think it is too generous to RJ. TLJ came out at peak "subvert expectations" writing room trickery, a holdover from writers strike quality downfall coinciding with mass internet theorycrafting. Being intentionally obtuse may have been RJs objective, but you can be obtuse without being stupid.

TLJ had 2 main features: Hype Moments, and Narrative Scorched Earth. The Hype Moments (bomb drops, lightspeed ramming, horse chase, luke bombardment, Dark Rey Tease) work in isolation but make no narrative sense for any preceding work. The Narrative Scorched Earth was Stunning And Brave, but ultimately too blank for the Story Group to work with.

Where TLJ fails is in making its characters just so fucking unlikable. Everyone is an incompetent stupid ugly retard soyface, so the fans did in fact want the dead old characters back because they were just that much more compelling than the replacements offered up. RJ smugly challenged coonsumers that their theories were wrong, and gave nothing compelling in return.

The ultimate mistake of course is to return to "Mystery Boxes Are A Substitute For Plot" Abrams as the writer/director for Ep 9. In the hands of a competent writer director there maybe could have been some salvaging of a new story from the ruins of the TLJ and TFA narrative. Galactic level chaos, competing philosophies of the Force, new cool ships, whatever. Nostalgiagooning is the worst memberberries to hang a story off of and it is telling that Disney is trying desperately to find a time period where Star Wars can exist again without relying on the bullshit of the Sequel Trilogy.

I have never seen The Last Jedi. Instead, I have consumed probably twice its runtime in YouTube reviews demolishing it and had an absolutely fantastic time.

Even better than RedLetterMedia's MrPlinkett review (which is excellent btw), is this deliciously merciless deconstruction from E;R. Great to watch at 1.25-2x with some beer and friends.

I have never seen The Last Jedi. Instead, I have consumed probably twice its runtime in YouTube reviews demolishing it and had an absolutely fantastic time.

Same here. For me, the issue is that I'm so allergic to the injection of progressive politics into media that I usually stop watching the moment I see the first woke trope. Which basically means that I turn off / walk out from just about any movie or television show made after 2016 or so.

Agreed. Woke stuff is the sign to me that the writers room is too cowardly to push back on any potentially bad idea so the chance of a misfire increases exponentially. Peak woke resulted in absolute trash entertainment; something like The Society Of Magical Negroes would never have been greenlit outside of peak race grovelling.

Woke stuff is the sign to me that the writers room is too cowardly to push back on any potentially bad idea so the chance of a misfire increases exponentially. Peak woke resulted in absolute trash entertainment; something like The Society Of Magical Negroes would never have been greenlit outside of peak race grovelling.

I agree with this too -- it would be pretty unusual and surprising to see a great piece of entertainment with woke elements infused. But even if I did, I would probably walk out. Because modern wokeness is more than just putting Lieutenant Tehura on the bridge. Modern wokeness is nasty and mean-spirited. It means that Captain Kirk must be a bumbling idiot. Or evil. Or both.

I sympathize, I've also mostly stopped watching any new mainstream movie or TV show. But I'd suggest giving TLJ a shot with interpretation- the resistance is led by incompetents who wrangled their way to power for political reasons. They're being steadily ground down to nothing by white male space Hitler, who has somehow rebuilt a large and very functional Galactic Empire. He has no magical powers, but he still wins out in the end through good old fashioned military force. The good guys win.

That's really funny that you can enjoy the content bashing it without even seeing the actual movie!

Is it? A lot of documentaries and internet content is like that.

Take the internet historian's video about the sinking of the Costa Concordia, i was barely aware of it having happened but the story of how crazy the disaster was was interesting on its own without any investment in the actual real world event.

TLJ was interesting because it was such a thorough disaster that it seemed almost scientifically made to be as bad as possible and destroy any future for the Star Wars brand. I'm not a big star wars fan but I remember spending many hours theory crafting with friends about how one could possibly fix things without something ridiculous like time travel or a reboot. When something is as big as this is this bizarre, it tickles the brain.

Take the internet historians video about the sinking of the Costa Concordia, i was barely aware of it having happened but the story of how crazy the disaster was was interesting on its own without any investment in the actual real world event.

I hardly knew anything about Costa Concordia before watching that video, and I've since watched that video about five times.

I think Holdo was supposed to be incompetent. Why are all the rebel leaders in Star Wars so good at their jobs? Real militaries are full of idiots who get their jobs through political connections, and rebel forces even more so. Her strange appearance ("admiral purple hair") also suggests this. The movie is just being realistic here- an incompetent person is placed in high rank for political reasons ("the force is female!") and disaster ensues

This is hilarious. Otherwise I'm not sure if I agree, although I like this flavor of Star Wars cope. @hanikrummihundursvin put it perfectly.

I'm half-convinced of a theory by Adam Roberts - Holdo has to be incompetent because the narrative logic of the film demands it. We want to see the heroes pull out victories against impossible odds, the more impossible the odds the more dramatic the victory, and at some point that requires incompetence from the commanding officers who got the heroes into that terrible situation in the first place.

On the other hand - in the original trilogy, nothing like this happens. The Rebel commanding officers in ANH, ESB, and RotJ are consistently professional, authoritative, and well-reasoned in their decision-making. If they make a bad call (and probably the only one is falling for the Emperor's trap in RotJ), it is nonetheless a bad decision that we can imagine a sensible person making, given what they knew at the time. If we look at how the background Rebels behave at Yavin, Hoth, or Endor, they are generally calm, reliable, and seem to know what they're doing. They seem like people you would trust to have at your back. So clearly it's possible to tell a dramatic story in this genre, where the heroes win a desperate victory against overwhelming odds, without incompetent commanders.

On the other other hand, though... that works in the OT, at least in part, because the villains of the OT are credible and intimidating. The OT has Tarkin, Vader, and Emperor Palpatine to work with, all of whom are convincingly threatening. The films never undermine their villains. The Rebels might be capable professionals, but so are the Imperials. That is not the case in the ST. The sequels have devoted significant screen time to establishing that their villains are a clown show. Kylo Ren is an immature brat who establishes screen presence through mere physical violence - he's a thug, with none of Vader's presence. Hux is a resentful boob, seen quivering with impotent rage more than he is genuinely threatening people. The heroes do not take these villains seriously. In the opening scene of TLJ, the heroes ring up and sass the villains. This undermines them as threats. (Comparison: in the OT, the heroes never mock the villains. I think the closest it comes is Han referring to the Imperials as slugs. But Tarkin, Vader, or the Emperor are always treated with deathly seriousness.) So the sequel films cannot rely on the villains to establish a sense of threat. The villains are too weak, in narrative terms, to do that.

Now the obvious response here is, "Well, then they shouldn't have had awful villains." I tend to agree. But I think there's a case you can make that the ST has lame villains for a valid storytelling purpose - Kylo Ren isn't supposed to be the second coming of Darth Vader, but rather him being an insecure Vader fanboy is part of the point. Where the Empire in the OT was generally composed of mature adult men with confidence and a degree of professionalism, the First Order in the ST are insecure twenty-something alt-right imitators. Maybe the films are trying to make a point about neo-Nazis or something. Okay, sure. But if you go with that, if the films are meant as some kind of deconstruction of youths imitating the patterns of evil regimes of bygone eras, then all of the films need to support that, and they can't just re-run the plot beats of the OT.

And unfortunately they do. Even TLJ, honestly, is a pretty by-the-numbers re-run of ESB; I don't know why people think it's subversive or deconstructive. But you can't just re-run those plot beats while changing the things that made them work in the first place. Re-running the OT can work and produce a genuinely beloved Star Wars story - the original Knights of the Old Republic is just a straight OT re-run and everybody loves it - but it has to be done with more skill than went into the ST.

I found the "ring up and sass the villains" part broke the illusion for me just a couple of minutes into the movie, and it was downhill from there (dropping bombs like a B-17, really?). The idea that prank calls were relevant (or that secure authenticated comms wouldn't be expected) a long time ago in a galaxy far away was way too far, IMO.

I found the "ring up and sass the villains" part broke the illusion for me just a couple of minutes into the movie

I genuinely debated leaving the theater because I realized the movie was a lost cause, but that would have bummed out my dad.

(Comparison: in the OT, the heroes never mock the villains. I think the closest it comes is Han referring to the Imperials as slugs. But Tarkin, Vader, or the Emperor are always treated with deathly seriousness.)

No. Leia sassed Tarkin in the original film:

LEIA: Governor Tarkin. I should have expected to find you holding Vader's leash; I recognised your foul stench when I was brought on board.

TARKIN: Charming, to the last. You don't know how hard I found it, signing the order to terminate your life.

LEIA: I'm surprised you had the courage to take the responsibility yourself.

In ESB Luke sasses Vader at the beginning of their fight (though, of course, this is specifically him being a headstrong idiot):

VADER: You have learned much, young one.

LUKE: You'll find that I'm full of surprises.

And in RotJ Han sasses Jabba on a couple of occasions (though, of course, Jabba is not an Imperial):

THREEPIO: His High Exaltedness, the great Jabba the Hutt, has decreed that you are to be terminated immediately.

HAN: Good. I hate long waits.

[...]

THREEPIO: Victims of the almighty Sarlacc, His Excellency hopes that you will die honorably. But should any of you wish to beg for mercy, the great Jabba the Hutt will now listen to your pleas.

JABBA: Jedi!

HAN: Threepio! You tell that slimy piece of worm-ridden filth, he'll get no such pleasure from us!

There's not a lot of it, not remotely to the degree seen in your clip, and RotJ goes very hard on having Luke be courteous even to his foes. But there is a little.

She sassed him but then he blew her homeworld up. I don't think she won that exchange.

So clearly it's possible to tell a dramatic story in this genre, where the heroes win a desperate victory against overwhelming odds, without incompetent commanders.

Case in point, LotR. The good guys are fairly competent, just up against a juggernaut of an empire ruled by Satan's lieutenant himself.

Even LotR is a good example of a movie failure along these same lines - the films injected a lot of arbitrary or fake drama dependent on character stupidity (e.g. everything with film-Arwen, Sam abandoning Frodo in Cirith Ungol), rather than trust that the original story was tense enough on its own.

This is even better in the books. Denethor and Theoden each have their moments of great competence, countered by the Witch-King. Saruman is arguably incompetent, but still a fearsome adversary just due to numbers and the timing constraints the free peoples are operating under.

That is not the case in the ST. The sequels have devoted significant screen time to establishing that their villains are a clown show. Kylo Ren is an immature brat who establishes screen presence through mere physical violence - he's a thug, with none of Vader's presence. Hux is a resentful boob, seen quivering with impotent rage more than he is genuinely threatening people.

That was a choice made mostly in TLJ, they didn't have to set them up this way.

This scene is in TFA. As is this one.

Ren was a figure of mockery from the first film.

That's not mockery on the "can't take this guy seriously level". Compare it to officer what's-his-name getting thrown around the room by Snoke, in front of his subordinates.

Those scenes present Ren as a petulant child, which suffices for my point, I think? The ST fails to develop truly credible villains.

How could Snoke possibly become a threatening bad guy in the absence of, lol, having Palpatine somehow return earlier? Having a half-bit Palpatine was a huge mistake; the First Order should have been some combination of a) overwhelming military resources and b) stupid Dark Witches bullshit trying to regain the Force as an advantage. Snoke is a horribly bad villain from the bottom up.

Another big problem with TLJ is that most of the non-Jedi stuff (Rose, etc) is just incredibly cringe.

I do agree that this is somewhat interesting as meta commentary in TLJ: everyone is stuck trying to rehash the original trilogy, characters and fans alike. But the movie doesn't do enough with it, and, worst of all, RoS fatally ignores the critique made by TLJ instead of transcending it, which dooms both movies' critical value.

Its a funny take with some support in reality, but not on the military front. The real weird part about TLJ and the sequels is, the part where the Rebels allegedly won, but in universe the Empire guys are actually stronger now. A good story is the explanation why the rebels failed to establish a new, successful, government because very few people are George Washington and competent at governance during both rebellion and while founding a new nation. Most such scenarios do fail. Washington was an extraordinary figure.

The sequels being about bad governance and failure of new leadership is probably a much better set of movies, but also really hard to write.

I admit, I'm headcanoning that part pretty hard. But it really does help me enjoy the film if I imagine that Holdo really is just some incompetent buffoon who got the job by political shenanigans, and now everyone is just stuck dealing with her. Sort of like character Umbridge in Harry Potter 5 I guess.

Spoilers!

That moment Luke appeared in front of Ren on the battlefield and survived all of that weapons fire. That was so exciting. Luke was going to lay the biggest fucking beatdown on that Ren guy, who so badly deserved it.

And then it doesn't happen. Instead Luke's entire life ends just trying to be a diversion.

I wish I had seen it in theaters. I bet the disappointment would have been palpable.

I'm still kind of pissed off about it. I sat through that damn movie waiting for closure and it was denied. Luke checks out with basically a whimper.

Well played, Johnson. Definitely peed on Star Wars with that one.

Too bad they had Holdo sacrificing herself to slice that first order ship in half instead of Leia, given that the Carrie Fisher died so soon after. That would have been perfect.

Look, I don't want to defend TLJ overall, because I think it's a bad film, but I feel like this deserves a reminder of what the OT was about. Remember that the dramatic climax of the OT is Luke Skywalker throwing away his weapon and refusing to fight. The idea that what a Jedi needs to do is lay huge beatdowns on people is explicitly contrary to the text. Jedi are humble servants of peace, remember? Wanting a flashy show of power, a character demonstrating his dominance by crushing his foe, is Sith logic.

I thought that scene worked, actually, because even though Kylo Ren has all the physical power in the scene, he is obviously a pathetic loser and nobody, not even his own underlings, has respect for him. He has power but no presence. Meanwhile the projection of Luke has no physical power at all, but he has all the presence. He does not even need to be there to be more powerful than Ren could ever be. He, like Obi Wan before him, is more powerful than someone like Ren could possibly imagine.

The OT repeatedly makes that point. Just being able to destroy stuff, just being able to win fights, is not what makes one great. You may recall that the power to destroy a planet is insignificant next to the power of the Force.

Again, I am not defending TLJ in totality. I think that the entire Sequel Trilogy is a creatively bankrupt exercise in point-missing and I never want to watch that film again. But in this one, very limited context, I think it is really missing the point of what the OT was saying about power to conclude that Luke was in some way a failure because he didn't physically dominate Ren.

That's true, but I think it's a good feel it's a good example of what I mean when I say that the Jedi from the original trilogy are just very limited and stretched to the limits of what you can narratively do with them. It's very interesting to see a quasi-pacifist hero in a war movie, but you have to really rig the plot to make that work. I don't want to see Luke sitting around in a swamp offering mystical mumbo-jumbo doing nothing, like Yoda, but I also don't want to see him charging in killing everything. He sorta got lucky with RotJ that he could be a pacifist so that Vader could do the actual killing. It's fine to be in inspiration or philosopher, but someone still has to do the actual fighting, and they just never really had a good answer for that.

I'm certainly not saying that I think Luke should never fight. There were plenty of excellent EU stories featuring Luke where he got up to dramatic adventures. But I think there's a fundamental tension in Star Wars - on the one hand, Yoda is right, wars don't make one great, humility and pacifism are good. On the other hand, adventure is good. Ambition, that yearning to do something more, everything epitomised by this scene - that's also good. The best Star Wars stories, in my view, manage to navigate this tension and find a balance. Passivity or apathy are not virtues.

At the same time, mere activity is not a virtue either. Violence or ability to destroy by itself is not to be lauded. That's why, for instance, that scene with Luke in season two of The Mandalorian is such a painful exercise in point-missing. What does it to take to be prepared for heroic action, without glorifying action as such? What is the proper internal disposition of a Jedi?

It makes me think of Kipling - to wait and not be tired by waiting, to dream and not make dreams your master.

The prequel trilogy had the Jedi becoming reluctant leaders in a massive war, though, and then had that backfiring on them horribly in multiple ways. This was one of the good things about the prequel plot: it retconned Obi Wan's and Yoda's reclusion and pacifism as being a desperate reactionary attempt to return to the old pre-war ways, an overreaction which makes more sense from that psychological point of view than on its own merits, as the original trilogy itself showed their attitudes to be quite lacking. Fortunately the original trilogy also shuffled the last of the old guard Jedi out of the way in the end, clearing the stage for Luke's more tempered, more reluctant, more battle-tested inclinations toward pacifism and forgiveness, ready to try to build something anew.

How do you balance a unwavering love of peace with the varying need for violence? It's an interesting question, and it was all nicely set up for them to add new thematic answers to! They had a formerly main character who'd aged to fit the "old wise mentor whose advice might not be listened to" role himself (and whose wisdom therefore wouldn't necessarily disrupt the narrative tension of protagonists making their own mistakes), who'd seen the consequences of both extremes, and who definitely could come up with advice better than "I should try to murder my nephew in his sleep and then abandon the galaxy". All the sequel trilogy needed to do was complete the last third of the "thesis, antithesis, synthesis" dialectic, instead of going with "thesis, antithesis, potato".

I wish I had seen it in theaters. I bet the disappointment would have been palpable.

In theaters, opening night, at that point the levels of Rian Johnson's "I know that you know that I know that you know" subverting expectations for the sake of subverting expectations had worn me down so much that by that point in the film I felt nothing. I remember being excited that Luke was going to be the badass we desperately wanted to see, being annoyed it was all an illusion, being relieved he was still safe, then just being annoyed/numb that he got killed anyways because fuck it, why not?

I left the theater wondering what the fuck I had just watched. I watched Solo and actually really enjoyed it. It left me thinking only a boomer can make a proper Star Wars movie. I never watched anything Star Wars after that. Not even The Mandalorian. Whatever love I had for Star Wars, which my dog eared West End Games RPG books can attest to, just evaporated after Last Jedi.

I watched Solo and actually really enjoyed it.

IMO it wasn't bad (nor amazing) when I saw it later, but I probably would have seen it in a theater if TLJ hadn't been so bad.

I honestly forget precisely how quickly I'd seen it, and if I watched a RLM review first or not. But I did see it in theaters.

Admittedly my decision to see it was somewhat nonsensical. Because TLJ had already killed Star Wars for me, but perhaps I wasn't quite done with my stages of grief yet. Maybe I'd heard it was good? Maybe Ron Howard seemed a steady enough hand to deliver a competent homage to the boomer childhood pastiche that Star Wars lives in, a dirge for a world that is dead and passing out of living memory faster and faster.

At the end of the day, I look forward to one day watching my de-special editioned fan edit of the original trilogy with my children one day. But that will probably be it.

I saw it in theaters. It was, indeed, very disappointing. Turns out my childhood hero was completely useless. But then, I don't know what i really expected from one kooky old man.

Chopping the ship in half made me think: "wait, they can do that now? Could they always do that? Makes all their previous fights look kinda dumb if that's the case. Maybe the rebels are all going to become suicide bombers now and kamikaze their way to victory? That's uh... an interesting tactic to show to kids..."

I’ve pondered this theory on occasion as well. I find it significant that the only memorable quote in the entire movie is “Let the past die. Kill it if you have to.”

"MOOOORE. MOOOOORE. MOOOORE". Literally the only meme that came out of the sequel trilogy that isnt used mockingly.

Amazing. Everything you just said is wrong.

^ To me that is a far more memorable quote from the movie, but YMMV and all that.

This theory, similar to the latest Matrix movie, describes a sort of rebellion of the artist against the industry, medium and ultimately the audience. Like a band that is tired of playing their hit song again and again so they instead smash their instruments to close out the show.

To me it's always felt petty, childish and self absorbed. A critique I'd levy against many modern artists. Worse yet, it implies that the artist is above the audience. That they know how to make something great, but are choosing not to. Which is simply not true.

The proposition that the Wachowskis could make another thought provoking Matrix movie is unfounded. The proposition that Rian Johnson could make a great Star Wars movie is unfounded. If either had teased that they could deliver exactly the kind of experience everyone wanted, but instead took it all away at the end, then they would at least have the merit to call themselves trolls. But they could not muster even that. Worse yet, neither managed to rebel at all against the industry that owns them.

The Wachowskis were goaded into making another subpar action flick that could make Warner Brothers some money. Rian Johnson tried to sour the new to protect the old, but all we get is an endless stream of crap so bad the old gets stained with it anyway. Rian intentionally making a bad movie changed nothing, he just got the 'sub par directors makes shitty Star Wars slop' party started early.

This type of endeavor is perfectly described here.

In an age of mediocre slop and mass produced thoughtless timewasting, the rebellion is making something good, deep, pure and thoughtful. But Rian can't do that. Maybe he lacks the talent, maybe he was constrained by the industry, or maybe the mass audience is simply too fractured, deracinated and mentally fried to ever be reached with a meaningful message, or maybe it's something else. In any case, as an artist in a world of slop, Rian isn't above anything or anyone so long as he participates.

The proposition that the Wachowskis could make another thought provoking Matrix movie is unfounded.

Interestingly, while the original trilogy was directed by the Wachowskis, The Matrix Resurrections was solely directed by Lana. I'm not saying that Lilly's involvement would have improved the experience, but strictly speaking the Wachowskis have not made a Matrix movie together since Revolutions. (Lilly is, uh, otherwise occupied.)

The Wachowskis were goaded into making another subpar action flick that could make Warner Brothers some money.

I'm willing to cut the Wachowskis some slack because, as far as I understood the situation, they didn't want to make the movie at all, knowing to leave well enough alone, but were given an ultimatum that if they don't, it will be handed to someone else. Under those circumstanfes it actually makes sense to blow the whole thing up, and unlike Johnson, it was actually their franchise to kill.

I don't even know about the "could make the studio some money" part. It didn't ane they did a damn good job of ensuring it turns out that way. It's a terrible Matrix film, but as a rant against Hollywood, it's was amusing to watch.

Thank you for expressing my thoughts better than I could have. I started composing a version of this comment in my head as I was reading my way down, but I don't even have to.

The thing is, I don't think it's possible to make another great Star Wars movie- all the good ideas were completely used up in the original trilogy. There isn't some deep, complex world building there that can be continued. Part of what makes it good is that it all wraps up so neatly. Back in the 90s they made a bunch of books to continue the story, and an awful lot of them were about the emperor coming back to life and then getting taken down again by Luke, Han, and Leia, because what else can you even do?

I think JJ Abrams is good at making fun, exciting movies, and he gave us two Star Wars movies that were just like the originals. But they're also incredibly bland and forgettable. Basically Star Wars slop. I think that any "normal" Star Wars movie would be pretty much the same.

Also, for what it's worth I'm a fan of Rian Johnson's other movies. I thought that both Looper and Knives Out were great. Also that one weird episode of Breaking Bad about the fly. So it's not that he's incapable of making good movies.

The thing is, I don't think it's possible to make another great Star Wars movie- all the good ideas were completely used up in the original trilogy.

I think Andor was really well executed --- I worried they'd bungle a second season because a small passion project got attention and the studio execs would demand creative control and make terrible decisions (see The Mandalorian). But I think it shows there is plenty of room for world building and character arcs that exist in the same universe galaxy, but aren't heavily tied to the Skywalker saga of the trilogies.

As someone with only a casual interest in Star Wars and who hasn't read the EU, I once idly thought about what I would have done if TFA were mine to make. Personally, I'd try and go more into what the Dark Side of the Force actually is. The first trilogy implied that the Force had a will and was trying to rid itself of its dark side. I would start with the idea that the Dark Side also possessed a will and was trying to engineer its own return. Keep Kylo Ren as powerful but insecure, and show us force ghosts of the Sith corrupting him.

I do like the idea of exploring your interpretation of the Force, but I also like interpretations just the opposite of yours, even if they draw as heavily on the prequel as on the original trilogy.

So that's what I'd do: interpretationS, plural.

Much of the genius of early Star Wars was that it hinted at a much larger universe than it had time to show on screen. Lucas started unnecessarily spoiling this pretty quickly ("I am your father", okay, but "sister" too? How small is this "galaxy", anyway?), and after everyone had time to reflect in between trilogies and then continue the spoilage anyway, it just became more clear that those hints of grand scope were only a lucky accident (C3-PO and Chewbacca had to get memberberry parts too? seriously?) ... but we could try to recapture some of that scope, on purpose, by establishing a universe that's at least ideologically large. Show more places where Han's "hokey religion" attitude was just common sense, because there were only ever ten thousand Jedi among millions of planets. Show more of the core Sith point of view that makes it so dangerously tempting. Show the various contradictory lies that the Sith spread until they took on lives and followings of their own. Show which Jedi beliefs might only be true "from a certain point of view" and at least leave room for a little doubt with the rest.

On the other hand, TFA actually loved hinting at mysteries, which was wasted when that prep work just got thrown out by TLJ, leaving little more than a paint-by-numbers rework of ANH behind. The prequel trilogy did more hinting at grand scope (if only by accident, in between the spoilage), but it got buried by wooden dialogue and cartoonish set pieces. It's easy to pick out one thing at a time that we could have done better, but I'm sure I'd have done a dozen different things worse as a directory.

Now, as a producer, if the whole sequel trilogy had been mine to make, the major changes would have been easy: insist on having three scripts in advance (even if the second and third might be heavily changed later), insist on either more closure for the first two movies' endings or giving all three movies to the same director or both, and don't let that director be either a "mystery box!" guy or a "subvert expectations!" guy.

Oh, and I would absolutely excise the schtick where they have to practically retcon the rebels' huge victory to try to make them the Loveable Underdog again, but that's another obvious big-picture improvement that could be very easy to screw up entirely when we get down into all the critical little details.

See the Jedi Academy trilogy.

I've never read any EU books, but I've played lots of videogames. Is it a coincidence that the Jedi Academy book trilogy is about Exar Kun's ghost coming back and the videogame Jedi Academy is about Marka Ragnos's ghost coming back?

I couldn't say. The similarity is suspicious, though.

Rogue One was excellent. I think there's room for stories from the old Republic era.

While posters below are right that the Bantam/Del Rey era only featured one resurrected Emperor plot, you are broadly correct still because every new Big Bad Evil Guy was basically a new version of the Emperor.

As for wherher you can do a good star wars movie anymore, I think its possible (Andor as a movie could work) but that misses the point. Disney doesnt need a good star wars movie. It needs something that hits the toyetic fan cosplay dopamine to keep kidults continually spending money on roleplaying their Luke selfinsert, whether as fighter pilot (as Chris Roberts of Star Citizen fame promises his fans) or as badass warrior monk. George Lucas lucked out with mandalorian and stormtrooper/clone armor being so cool, otherwise no one would buy into the universe. Using lego set sales as proxies you can see most people resonate with OT and PT stuff still, not ST. Pure failure from Disney, but they decided to slaughter the golden goose to engage Modern Audiences.

because what else can you even do?

Obviously nostalgia is providing some fuel here, but there's actually so much you can do. Star Wars shines because the universe, while logically inconsistent (I'd take over so fast with a Dyson swarm that makes missiles it's not even funny), is such a VIBE

All the best Star Wars content is the side stories. It's a clone raid on a McGuffin factory. It's the story of a bounty hunter getting caught up in something big. It's a tale of exploration in the Old Republic. Basically take any plot that would work in a Western, and give everyone blasters instead.

The graphic novels went so hard.

As you say, it's not very logical but the vibe goes hard. I think a big part of that vibe though is the Jedi, and that's really a problem. They looked so cool in the original movie, because the original was basically rigged to make them look good. The storm troopers had these clunky blasters that could only fire very slowly, plus they missed a lot, so the Jedi could just block all their shots with a sword. And they were easily brainwashed. And there were no computers, so the Jedi having "supernatural timing sense" was a big deal, since everyone else was just guessing at the bomb timings.

But their power is so limited, and their philosophy is just not that deep. Empire and RotJ are already hitting the limits- Luke can lift rocks with his mind, and that's neat, but isn't going to do much in a big space war. Yoda talks in riddles to avoid every having to say something specific. And Lucas was adamant that the Jedi were always pure good, no shades of grey, so you can't even explore that road.

It seems like the reason the side stories can be good is that they mostly avoid the Jedi? That gives a lot more space for other characters to have agency, and they can use more realistic technology instead of having to pretend that a sword is still the most powerful weapon in the universe.

I don't think it's possible to make another great Star Wars movie. All the good ideas were completely used up in the original trilogy. Back in the 90s they made a bunch of books to continue the story, and an awful lot of them were about the emperor coming back to life and then getting taken down again by Luke, Han, and Leia, because what else can you even do?

This is blatant misinformation. Only a single storyline, the comic series Dark Empire, featured a revived Emperor. There were lots of cool Star Wars books, running the gamut from standalone books like The Truce at Bakura, The Crystal Star, and I, Jedi to sprawling series (plural) like Rogue Squadron, New Jedi Order, and Legacy of the Force.

...I was going to make an objection here to including Legacy of the Force, but then I saw that you mentioned The Crystal Star as well, so I assume you are taking the piss.

There are indeed a lot of excellent Star Wars novels and sequels, though, and Rogue Squadron and New Jedi Order are definitely among them.

I haven't read any Star Wars books in maybe ten years, and The Crystal Star in particular in maybe fifteen years. But I do not remember The Crystal Star's being particularly bad (though I do recall thinking it was rather weird that the Solo twins were able to create light with the Force by vibrating air molecules in their prison cell). The point is that it is among a zillion books that are suitable for movie treatment.

Crystal Star is so out there that I'm convinced that, along with many other books, are actually edits of preexisting sci fi works hidden in the deep drawers if authors that were repurposed to Star Wars as long as there was a spaceship and magic involved. Black Fleet Trilogy, Crystal Star, even Courtship fall in this category. Once new concepts totally unrelated to established main canon are introduced as standalone concepts, then the whole fanfic aspect becomes obvious.

This is blatant misinformation. Only a single storyline, the comic series Dark Empire, featured a revived Emperor. There were lots of cool Star Wars books, running the gamut from standalone books like The Truce at Bakura, The Crystal Star, and I, Jedi to sprawling series (plural) like Rogue Squadron, New Jedi Order, and Legacy of the Force.

While /u/BahRamYou's literal words are incorrect, I think the feeling behind them is directionally correct.

An awful lot of the pre-Disney Star Wars books basically had the plot, "Imperial remnant of the week shows up with a new superweapon." So even if the Emperor mostly stayed dead, it was hard to feel like the Empire was well and truly done for good.

There's a big difference between "the Empire remains a relevant force" and "it's just the Emperor again" though. A fledgling New Republic dealing with an Imperial remnant force with its own local goals that the Republic is spread too thin to deal with is very different than "if the Imperials ever catch our fleet, we're all dead".

And while the remnants often have something unique that make them a threat to the New Republic, it's rarely a "superweapon" in the sense that the Death Star was one.

  • Thrawn himself was his "superweapon" and rather than being a weapon of mass destruction, he had highly tailored and specific tools that let him punch above his weight with the ships he had and his grab bag of tricks.
  • Ysanne Isard had a Super Star Destroyer, but that's just a conventional ship: her real threat was her planning and information-gathering, which eventually led to her master plan of taking over bacta production. Trying to choke out a key military supply is wildly different than anything the Emperor has ever tried.
  • Warlord Zsinj had a superweapon, the Nightcloak, but it was incredibly limited, an array of satellites that would block out light from reaching the planet. Functionally pretty much indistinguishable from orbital bombardment. Most of Zsinj's threat is his conventional fleet.

Not to say there were no Death Stars: the Sun Crusher is the one I want to call out as being the most boring "well what if we made a Death Star but better". But notably, the Sun Crusher spends very little time in the hands of the Imperial remnant, first serving as an escape tool and then falling into the hands of a troubled young Jedi. So there we have the Death Star, but not the Empire.

My favorite riff on the Death Star was Darksaber, where the main plot was a Hutt finding Bevel Lemelisk, the original architect of the Death Star, and trying to get the minimum-viable-product version of the Death Star, where it's just the laser and nothing else. This is a threat the New Republic has to take seriously and deal with, though it turns out the whole project was a train wreck and it's destroyed the first time it tries to fire the laser to clear an asteroid in its path.

The lack of any of this adjustment is one of the problems with the movie sequels: the First Order is played as exactly the same threat and type of threat as the Empire, with Death Star 3 and similarly overwhelming fleet, and the New Republic is immediately relegated to a background entity so that the good guys can be exactly the same as the Rebels.

I, Jedi

So, looking up the AI summaries for these books, this one says that "The story is unique for being the only Star Wars novel told from the first-person perspective of a character not seen in the films." That's uh, damning with faint praise. The others seem to be about either Luke going off to fight "the Empire Reborn" or him going off to fight a new big threat to the galaxy. "Luke Skywalker is guided to Bakura by a vision of Obi-Wan Kenobi, who warns him that the fate of the galaxy is at stake. "

I admit I haven't really read much of the star wars books or comics, but they don't exactly seem to be taking it in bold new directions.

That description is also untrue.

I feel like I'm only going to have to say this more and more in the future, but do not trust AI summaries about anything, especially not niche subjects. Come on, if you want to know what I, Jedi is about, the Wook has a detailed plot summary right there.

  • Truce at Bakura has the Resistance and Empire join together to fight off space dinosaurs that powered their machines with the tortured souls of harvested force-sensitive species, and really played into the Jedi as warrior-monks in the western-religious sense. Only mention of the Emperor is that he sold out the titular planet; Anakin Skywalker shows up as a ghost looking for forgiveness... and Leia tells him to fuck off. It was such a bold new direction that a lot of writers pretty carefully tiptoed around the whole thing for about a decade after.
  • Crystal Star is so weird that the only other EU book to mention it is only did so to glass the main planet involved. Weird cult sacrifices people to summon an extra-dimensional entity. Pretty sure it started out as a Star Trek novel and got lost somewhere. Not good, but definitely nothing like any movie.
  • I, Jedi focuses on an ex-cop-turned smuggler Force Sensitive working undercover to track down his disappeared wife and facing off against a pirate gang, while he Forrest Gumps his way through a bunch of post-Endor events. It's... actually a bit of a fix fic for the (tbf bad and very Empire Builds Another Superweapon) Jedi Academy Trilogy, so it's not the most accessible for people who haven't read others parts of the Expanded Universe, but it's a major point getting away from a lot of the trite Rebellion V Empire and Big Superweapons Go stuff.
  • Rogue Squadron (and the imo even better Wraith Squadron) books are a bit of a The Expendables: the stories are military fiction with high body-counts and more focus on intrigue. They're set against the Empire in most books, but the commanders are drastically different, and the closest thing to a superweapon is a not-very-special biological weapon more notable for its political impact.
  • New Jedi Order set a New Republic - which was mostly at peace with mostly-run-out-of-evil-people Empire since the end of The Hand of Thrawn series - against extragalactic invaders who were both religious fundamentalists and cut off completely from the force. About the only Original Series bit is the increasing use of planet-destroying superweapons, but that's a bit like complaining about oversized guns in Warhammer 40k given the topic focus.
  • Legacy of the Force falls after that, with the son of Han and Leia facing a force vision of the future holding that the only way to protect the galaxy and his daughter was to turn to the Dark Side and become a Sith Lord. Controversial, but there were some interesting bits: Jacen's a byronic hero/villain who genuinely struggles against the easy routes of power and hate and pride, and it's not a battle he can ever win... and then there's an Evil Bigger Badder Plain Evil Guy.

These aren't always good (I really dislike both NJO and LOTF for pretty dumb canned heat), and the ones that are good aren't always original (The Thrawn Trilogy's a send-up of the very 'Empire Reborn' stuff that you're criticizing and has to invoke it to deconstruct it, Wraith Squadron has a few comedic bits that are basically Down Periscope In Space). Sometimes they're even just plain weird: I'm not recommending Darksaber when I say it's the best Kevin James Anderson work, but it actually does pretty a good breakdown of why the Empire's whole philosophy is so fucked up even if it's so deep in Bathos that there are Austin Powers jokes.

So, looking up the AI summaries for these books, this one says that "The story is unique for being the only Star Wars novel told from the first-person perspective of a character not seen in the films." That's uh, damning with faint praise.

That is a pretty terrible summary of I, Jedi so you should probably not listen to whatever other summaries that tool gave you. The pitch for that book was that it took a character, Corran Horn (the one not in the movies at all that your summary mentions) who was popular from previous books, and wove him into an existing (well liked) book's story in a way that felt reasonably natural. Think something like the Back To The Future 2 scenes where they are playing around the events of the first movie, that is kinda what that book does.

There are also lots of characters in the expanded universe books who aren't in the movies (kind of by necessity), as well as characters who are technically in the movies (e.g. Wedge Antilles) but who aren't real characters and get fleshed out almost entirely by the books. So it's definitely not noteworthy that this particular book centers around a character not from the movies.

The others seem to be about either Luke going off to fight "the Empire Reborn" or him going off to fight a new big threat to the galaxy. "Luke Skywalker is guided to Bakura by a vision of Obi-Wan Kenobi, who warns him that the fate of the galaxy is at stake. "

I mean, it's heroic fantasy. What do you want them to do? The genre is kind of defined by people going off to fight larger than life threats. You seem to have this idea that to be good, a new entry needs to go in a bold new direction, but that would in my opinion make it a terrible new entry. I don't want bold new directions from sequels; if I wanted something totally new I'd just watch(/read/play) something new. When I reach for a sequel I want something substantially the same as the first one, but with some new elements sprinkled in to make it interesting.

I'll have to yield to you on the books. Like I said I really haven't read much, and it was a long time ago that I read any.

I'm not saying that anything needs to be different in order to be good. Like I read a lot of manga that tends to stick to the same structure over and over again... I'm fine with that. Sometimes there's value in just finding something good and sticking with it.

I think Star Wars is weird because the Jedi are just inherently a bit silly. The originals somehow managed to make them look cool by only using their powers sparingly and not going into too much detail about their religion. But every time we see more of them, it starts to fall apart a bit. Their swords don't work very well for fighting in space, they talk a lot about pacifism but mostly they're going around fighting, and they never seem to achieve any sort of real lasting peace so they're just failing at their jobs.

The way I see it, it's sort of like a magic trick. It looks awesome the first time you see it. But when you go back to look at the same trick again and again, in great detail... you start to see the hidden wires and the magic falls off.

You haven't played Knights of the Old Republic 2, have you?

i have not. I played Star Wars: Jedi Knight but I don't remember any story from it.

More comments

Kevin J Anderson (author of the Jedi Academy series and the I, Jedi fixfic written solely to close narrative loopholes) is one of the worst writers of the Bantam era of Star Wars Expanded Universe, and there are an incredible number of contenders for that title. Timothy Zahns Thrawn trilogy and the Michael A Stackpole series of X Wing novels were adrenaline shots for the franchise legacy, since much of the rest were middling quality and canon inconsistent.

The easy way to see which aspects of the canon worked are to see which survived the disney transition: Thrawn.... yea thats it. No Kaarde, Calisto, Xizor, Han Solo Twin Brother... most concepts are too dirt tier to be worth maintaining. There is deep lore here that is not worth brain cells to expound; suffice to say Star Wars was a limping property that needed the prequel trilogy to give narrative space for the key ingredient (jedi, superweapons, cool armor soldiers) to thrive in the clone wars narrative era. The dearth of sequel era works is precisely proof of the narrative graveyard that Disney ran the franchise into.

I remember deeply enjoying the Thrawn trilogy when I read it a decade ago. It's basically my headcanon Star Wars 7, 8 and 9. Perfectly captures the essence of the original trilogy, gives them a fantastic new villain who challenges them in devilish new ways.

And that's about as far as I got on my "Expanded Universe" exploration. I think I got through another book or two that failed to leave any impression what so ever.

I remember deeply enjoying the Thrawn trilogy when I read it a decade ago. It's basically my headcanon Star Wars 7, 8 and 9.

Same, which is made easier by only having seen pieces of TFA and not seeing TLJ and whatever followed it. After enduring the prequels, I decided I was done with SW overall.

And that's about as far as I got on my "Expanded Universe" exploration.

Also same, although I've read plot summaries of others, and there are some batshit insane books out there. I mean that as both a compliment and a criticism. Whoever was in charge of licensing wasn't afraid to let some authors go wild.

No to incoherent worldbuilding.

No to "subverting expectations."

No to, "it's bad on purpose."

No to cowards like Kathleen Kennedy who normalize this trash.

No to bathos.

No to destroying beloved franchises.

No to Vice-Admiral Gender Studies.

No.

So first of all, it's /r/saltierthancrait.

Secondly, Star Wars wasn't Rian Johnson's to destroy. On December 15, 2017, Star Wars meant something. On December 16, 2017, Star Wars was a joke. I went into The Last Jedi excited to see the movie. I went into Solo and Rise of Skywalker excited to see the RedLetterMedia review afterwards. These are two very different things.

In a world of rapidly eroding meaning, Star Wars used to mean something. Now Star Wars is meaningless too.

Secondly, Star Wars wasn't Rian Johnson's to destroy. On December 15, 2017, Star Wars meant something. On December 16, 2017, Star Wars was a joke

Does this post simply pretend that the prequels didn't exist?

By the time of TLJ, the past 5 movies in the Star Wars canon had veered from just about ok to downright garbage (technically there was that cartoon movie as well but I don't think anyone counts that). The series was batting 2 for 7

The prequels are overall good, with even the weakest (the first) still being an enjoyable movie. There are people who hate them passionately but they aren't the only Star Wars fans, nor as far as I can tell are they a clear majority of Star Wars fans.

Sorry but I can't take anyone seriously who believes this. There's a group of star wars fans who obviously like any Star wars content and have been suckered by memes and cartoons, but I doubt you'll find many who think the prequels are good movies. People can enjoy many terrible movies

I enjoy the prequels, but not because I "enjoy all sw content" or anything. The sequels are trash. I've only enjoyed (somewhat) Rogue One and some of the Mandalorian out of the Disney stuff.

The prequels have outstanding meme potential, but I also think they're just fun to watch, and they have some cool scenes and fights and great music. If I enjoy them, I can't really say they're categorically bad, can I? They should have been much better, but they have some qualities.

Star Wars wasn't Rian Johnson's to destroy

Let's be so for real here though, the prequels were mid and only redeemed themselves way later on.

The Force Awakens was SO BAD. TLJ is probably worse, but TFA was actually so bland and pure slop. Rise was also terrible, and it would have been just as bad if TLJ had been better. So many unforced errors that Rian didn't cause.

TFA is indeed not a very original movie, but at least Abrams is a competent director. The same can absolutely not be said of Lucas.

Before watching TFA I decided to rewatch the whole prequel trilogy with my girlfriend, since she hadn't seen it. We made it through The Phantom Menace, but we had to stop, because it was just too fucking awful. It is literally bad B movie level bad, like something you would see on MS3K, but where the only difference was a bigger special effects budget (and not even those hold up well by today's standards). I genuinely don't feel that it would be too much of a hyperbole to say that not a single good decision was taken when that movie was made. The contrast to TFA, which I watched a few days later was immense. Yes, finally! Basic level competence! Abrams can actually tell a story! And direct an exciting scene! He can even direct actors so they sound vaguely natural! And this actually feels like a movie made by a professional filmmaker!

The fact that people defend the prequels are for this reason completely incomprehensible to me. The only argument that even comes close to making sense is that at least Lucas tried to tell a more ambitious story about the fall of the Republic and Anakin's conversion to the dark side, but this is an extremely weak argument. Firstly, ambition means nothing if you can't write (and Lucas can't) and secondly, it is not like anything in the prequels is really that deep or complex. You easily find better written and more complex ideas in the rejection pile of your average science fiction publisher, or even your favourite fanfic repository.

I'm not going to defend TLJ and ROS though. They are indeed really, really, really bad movies. Genuinely awful. They might even be close to being as bad as the prequels, but they are definitely not any worse.

The fact that people defend the prequels are for this reason completely incomprehensible to me.

I'm personally partial to the argument that Jar Jar Binks was intended to be an "evil Yoda" type character. He's got supernatural luck at avoiding harm, he ended up getting himself into a position to hand the republic over to a chosen sith - like, he's already a fantastic villain.

Let's be so for real here though, the prequels were mid and only redeemed themselves way later on.

I mean, they didn't redeem themselves. Johnson and Abrams redeemed them.

and it would have been just as bad if TLJ had been better.

I don't know about that that. I think part Rise being so terrible was the scramble to finish the story from where TLJ left off. If they let Abrams do the whole thing, it would have been horrible slop, but it would be a bit more coherent.

Very wise and true!

Ah, sorry for getting the subreddit wrong, I didn't really look at it that closely. But they're both plenty active. An eternal war of light and dark, fighting each other in the star wars...

But yeah, I think this:

Secondly, Star Wars wasn't Rian Johnson's to destroy. On December 15, 2017, Star Wars meant something. On December 16, 2017, Star Wars was a joke. I went into The Last Jedi excited to see the movie. I went into Solo and Rise of Skywalker excited to see the RedLetterMedia review afterwards. These are two very different things.

Is what I was getting at it. I think a lot of people felt that way. It's actually kind of amazing how it managed to completely destroy the franchise, or at least change it into something unrecognizable. Imagine if Disney made a princess movie that completely soured everyone around the planet on the entire idea of "Disney princesses"- that would be kind of amazing and I have no idea how'd you make such a thing, let alone get a big budget from Disney itself to do it.

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