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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.
Abrams made a hack's movie but you're just never convince me that it isn't malpractice to throw out everything that even looked like set up in the second part of a trilogy when you had no say in how the third part would go.
This is a mistake that happened all over the EU. And in Doctor Who, where people grew up so enamored with their vision of what DW is that they squeezed it in instead of accepting that the canon and fandom was where it was. Sorry, you're in a relay race, you don't get to have it your way.
Johnson has to eat most of the blame. Or rather, Kennedy has to get it for allowing Johnson to do this.
Conceptually I think Kateleen Kennedy needed to escape the shadow of George Lucas's vision of Star Wars in order to keep the franchise bloom. Disneys purchase of Avengers hit an annual franchise value of about 2025USD3b/y (taking box office receipts and doubling it to include merch and ancillaries) 3 years after purchasing Marvel Studios and kept that hot streak going for 6 years before jizzsploding a 6bn double whammy with the Avengers finale. Lucasfilm stormed out the gate with 3bn right when TFA was purchased, but had a long tail of legacy stuff holding back development - canon itself was a drag. Or rather the sandbox kept retreating back to Jedi and Rebels. Abrams leaned too far into memberberries, Johnson composted the memberberries but also salted the earth, and Kennedy had no idea who was doing what.
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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.
Shouldn't that have been expected with J.J. Abrams though?
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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.
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TFA is a mediocre Star Wars film. TLJ essentially derailed the whole trajectory though
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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.
It's a relay race. It doesn't matter if, in isolation, TLJ was the least bad. It was so bad that it hobbled TROS (it's pretty damning that the studio that hired you basically wiped your contribution so it isn't really even a fan thing) so there's really no point talking about it being better than it.
TROS was fucked anyway for a variety of reasons (Fisher dying,the hiring and firing of Trevorrow) but TLJ gave it no good lead in.
I'm just not at all convinced that TLJ is why RoS was bad. I agree that TLJ doesn't give you a whole lot to go on, but then, TFA didn't either! None of these films seemed to be written with sequels in mind. The problem is the whole premise of the Sequel Trilogy, and it seems to me that blaming everything on TLJ is scapegoating Johnson too much for Abrams' failures.
That seems particularly evident to me if we look at the directors' other work? I didn't think much of Knives Out or Glass Onion, but I found them more-or-less watchable and entertaining, in a dumb sort of way. With Abrams, however, the obvious comparison is Star Trek (2009) and Star Trek Into Darkness. Abrams had done this once before - ST2009, like TFA, is a soft reboot that leaned into the popular perception of what the franchise was classically about, which at the time was greeted with a lot of hype and received positively, and then STID, like RoS, is a stale, creatively bankrupt attempt to imitate the original franchise, which was widely panned. Abrams fumbled the set-up with Star Trek, and he went on to fumble the set-up again with Star Wars, in pretty much the same way. Would he have done better if not for Johnson? I just cannot see any reason to think that. He screwed up and effectively killed a big budget science fiction film franchise in exactly the same way before people gave him Star Wars.
Yes, which is why I said elsewhere that Kathleen Kennedy is ultimately at fault for letting Johnson do this shit. Abrams shouldn't have been allowed to make ANH 2.0. But, once that's done, Johnson shouldn't have been allowed to fuck it up even more. You already lost anyone who wanted to see something truly different in the reintroduction. After that, you lost anyone who was even theoretically interested in Snoke or the rest of that shit or was holding on to it as a consolation.
This sort of thing is not unknown. The EU writers used to have shitfights and problems too. For Legacy of the Force Karen Traviss was essentially writing her own fanfictions with very strong opinions (Jedi are evil, virile Mandos are gods, basically). She went too far, other writers then took time to deconstruct her bullshit (specifically Troy Denning just having the Mandos absolutely wiped out lol). But, at the very least, the general story continuity was maintained. They only got to editorialize within that. Major decisions were cleared above.
I don't know what went wrong here: Lucas specifically picked Kennedy because she had a lot of experience producing and he figured she'd defend the integrity of Star Wars. She's defended it as her fiefdom but she seems to have no real sense or preference for where the trilogy should go (beyond the usual "diversification") if she just allowed each of these directors to do whatever they wanted. I think it may be that she worked well with Lucas and Spielberg because they had strong creative visions and simply couldn't provide her own and deferred to the creatives out of habit.
Abrams was never supposed to return. It was supposed to be three different directors. Someone else could have taken the plots that existed from TFA and not gone "psych!". Like, Johnson didn't just not give fulfilling answers to Abrams' mystery boxes, he called you stupid for caring and then fucked off leaving you nothing else to care about. Seriously, what did he build? Rose Tico?
Let's grant Abrams is a hack. As matter of numbers imo TFA simply didn't kill the franchise (well...I think he killed Star Wars' best shot at becoming an MCU-like phenomenon in China) or TLJ would have opened much worse. TLJ however did have bad legs and TROS didn't open well either (though obviously Abrams owns the legs here)
This isn't only my judgment: the higher-ups clearly think TLJ was a failure which is why they pulled the alarm and brought Abrams back.
I remember watching Brick as a kid and being blown away. He's actively regressed and that might explain why he did so badly with Star Wars. Sad.
Sure, I'll absolutely agree that the core problem is the overall management of the franchise and lack of vision.
But I'm not sure that following up a stale retread of ANH with a stale retread of ESB is that much of a betrayal, really? That sounds more like he understood the brief. To the extent that he tried to do anything even a bit more interesting than just making the OT again (and again I think the extent to which TLJ is subversive or radical is wildly over-stated), I'm more inclined to give him credit for at least trying something. Sure, it didn't really succeed, but I give a film-maker more credit for trying to do something, even if they fail, than I do one for just painting by numbers. If nothing else, a TLJ that just painted by numbers would have done nothing to arrest the decline.
Quarrels between authors are, as you say, not unknown from the EU. EU author-feuding or attempts to undermine or pull back on each other were common - Traviss and the Mando hissy fit, Troy Denning misunderstanding or trying to retcon NJO, Timothy Zahn sniping at Dark Empire in Hand of Thrawn, KJA writing Callista and the various Luke shipping wars, you name it. I feel a bit ambivalent about all that in hindsight. It was undoubtedly bad from the perspective of maintaining a uniform level of quality, but it also meant that the EU, lacking a single dominating authorial voice, became a case of survival of the fittest. The Luke shipping wars were not resolved by some voice from above coordinating all the others - instead a number of different authors wrote love interests for Luke and eventually the one that achieved the most buy-in from the fans was eventually given the nod. (Ironically, the only one that wasn't originally written as a love interest.) Callista and Gaeriel and all the others have just been dismissed with "yeah, the early EU was weird". The Mandalorian stuff is a huge mess and there are multiple contradictory ideas of who the Mandalorians are as a people - Traviss and Filoni are probably the biggest influences, but let's not underestimate the TotJ comics, the KotOR portrayals, even Republic Commando - and generally the ideas that resonated were taken up by subsequent authors, and the rest abandoned. The EU was a big pool where different authors sank or swam, and because Lucasfilm back in the day were quite generous with the license, a lot of people tried different ideas. And now in hindsight, well, ask any EU fan and they will give you a curated list of the good bits, and those are the parts that live on.
ESB built on ANH. It maintained the same foes and made Vader even more interesting. TLJ jettisons the main bad guy and leaves us with a guy who lost to an untrained rando and a comic relief General Hux. It wasn't ESB at all. Superficially, I grant.
Maybe if Rian had actually turned Rey evil as some are suggesting. But it didn't. Which is why I say it's a "fuck you" movie. It doesn't even give you a watered down ESB. If you're too constrained to be truly subversive, don't LARP.
There was an important difference: core stuff had a heavier lift to change. Even when Lucas couldn't even pretend to give a fuck you were not allowed to kill off an Original Trilogy major without permission. This is why Chewbacca's death in Vector Prime required approval and was supposed to be a big deal. Yes, fuck around with who Jaina Solo is going to end up with, fight it out with the comics. But the idea that you can character assassinate and then actually assassinate Han and Luke and do nothing with Leia...there'd be some complaints.
Also, the medium is different. It's easier to experiment with very cheap books compared to your one shot at one of the most anticipated sequels in blockbuster history. (One could suggest that they should have considered the EU as a giant laboratory and learned from the mistakes and distilled the successes like the early MCU instead of throwing it out and remaking the same mistakes all over again)
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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.
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.
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 "deconstructing Skywalker supremacy " stuff is also only in hindsight. JJ had no idea who Rey's parents were in TFA (Rian could have done anything he wanted there - simply have her be a particularly force sensitive child) and the EU is also full of non-Skywalkers having their moment. Which makes sense, because the core movies are about one set of characters.
We've discussed how other parts of it, namely Holdo's costuming, are both derivative and miss the point of what they're drawing from.
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