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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.
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.
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