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Notes -
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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I mean, they didn't redeem themselves. Johnson and Abrams redeemed them.
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!
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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:
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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