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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.
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.
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.)
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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.
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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.
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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.
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
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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.
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See the Jedi Academy trilogy.
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Rogue One was excellent. I think there's room for stories from the old Republic era.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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.
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