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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.
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.
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".
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 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.
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