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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   9658 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 17, 2025

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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.

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