The Force Awakens and its follow-ups had so few memorable characters, it’s a wonder Disney – and Oscar Isaac – are still talking about potential spin-offs
The Force Awakens and its follow-ups had so few memorable characters, it’s a wonder Disney – and Oscar Isaac – are still talking about potential spin-offs
I legit liked BB-8, Maz Kanata and Babu Frik. Could do with more of them.
As for the films:
Force Awakens - Mostly harmless. Gets a lot of hate for “just being Star Wars again” and that’s valid. But they needed to prove they could do Star Wars without Lucas, and they did.
Last Jedi - Looks great, absolutely shits the bed. Johnson needed an average 8 year old to come in and point out all the plot holes. “Here’s this tracker, you can use it to find us anywhere in the universe.” (Same scene, no cuts, First Order comes out of hyperspace) “HOW DID THEY FIND US! THAT’S IMPOSSIBLE!”
Rise of Skywalker - I feel bad for this one and generally give it a pass. Last Jedi painted them into a corner by killing Snoke, killing Phasma, killing Luke, reducing the size of the Resistance to something that could fit in the Falcon… and then… THEN Carrie Fisher up and dies. I don’t know what else they could have done. It was supposed to be Leia’s movie. 😟
Rise of Skywalker is the worst, because they couldn’t decide between ignoring Last Jedi or retconning it.
Half of the movie is Abrams making a sequel to a middle movie that was never made, and the other half is trying to please upset fans who hated Rose and the idea that Rey could be special without being related to some kind of franchise royalty.
In the end, they had an aimless film with no story direction that flipped between a confusing mess and some kinda fanfic hate letter to Johnson.
RoS was so bad it makes any negatives of episode 8 pale in comparison.
Oh no, Chewy is dead! Wait he’s alive.
Can’t access the sith language [for some reason].
The dagger is a map! But only if you stand in this one exact spot and even then it just kinda points in a general direction to a place on a crashed ship.
Just nonsense.
I legitimately forgot all of those plot points. I saw it in the theatre right after it opened and mostly remember it being really bad and aimless with Palpatine having been resurrected off-screen with no explanation, and the movie working hard to act like 8 didn’t happen.
I walked away thoroughly unimpressed and don’t even remember much of what happened.
Like - after your recap there, I still don’t remember anything about Chewie dying OR not dying, and I still don’t know if he made it to the end. I was (and still am) a die-hard Star Wars fan, and I can’t believe that not only do I remember the last film so poorly that not know if one of the OG heroes survived the last film, but I don’t really even care.
Honestly, that would have been better, and even as a TLJ-stan I would have understood. Instead, it went out of its way to fuck up its own pacing and damn near break the fourth wall to call out how much it didn’t like TLJ.
If you want a more comprehensive recap, I recommend either Jenny Nicholson or Red Letter Media, they both have very funny videos on all of the movies but especially RoS.
I didn’t even bother watching it after the first two, not even for free. I knew where this would be going.
They had an aimless film because Johnson ratfucked them and Fisher died. Like I say, they were in an impossible position.
It would have helped if they went into the thing with a unified vision 1-2-3, but they didn’t even do that and they still would have been screwed by Fishers death unless they thought ahead and managed to film all her scenes at once.
“Somehow, Palpatine returned”
Everyone: “This is Rj’s fault, really”
Yeah, because he killed Snoke. He could have expanded Snoke story in 2 leaving the 3rd movie to resolve it, instead he killed him for… reasons… leaving 3 to go “Well, fuck us, right?”
I don’t accept that the only conceivable option was to bring Palpatine back. I strongly suspect that 3 10 year olds in a room could generate a superior premise despite the constraints.
I kept expecting Phasma to come back with one burned eye to give Finn a close on his arc, but no, Johnson killed her too.
TL;DR: Agree on TFA. Disagree on TLJ; it is the best sequel. TRoS is almost unforgiveable.
I will stick up for The Last Jedi til the end of time. JJ dealt Rian Johnson a bum hand with Luke. The only options are shame-based self-exile, or something that would be concealed by a story of shame-based self-exile. There was also clearly a mandate not to make the legacy heroes the ones who solve the problems of the plots. That’s to say nothing of JJ resetting the political board in the least helpful way possible.
Given the constraints, I think RJ did a great job making a more character-driven piece that actually tried to play in the sandbox JJ created. It added notes of ambiguity and, yes, subverted certain expectations, but not so many as it’s accused of and still ultimately settled on the legend and the hope being worth fighting for. Poe’s arc was good. Luke’s arc was good. Rey’s arc was a bit confused but ultimately effective. Kylo being set up as the primary antagonist of Ep9 because he was too deeply damaged to (immediately) redeem was probably the single best direction they could have gone. Then, as you say it looked great. It was also the only sequel to directly embrace the prequels at all, and it included two of the most beautiful “Lucasian” tone poems of the entire series with the Luke-Yoda scenes and Rose’s sister.
Now, could certain things have been better? Yeah, definitely. Finn’s arc was only an incremental move from the one in TFA, and one that might plausibly been implied from it. A bit of a time jump would have given the characters room to breathe and not have rubbed the more resistant fans’ noses in Luke’s resistance to training Rey. The your-mom joke had a narrative purpose, but it simply didn’t land and therefore made the character beat less impactful. Rian should have understood that a non-negligible percentage of Star Wars fans want sci-fi consistency when they can get it and should have tied hyperspace tracking to the Holdo maneuver to make both of them too rare to be common either in the past or going forward. The set piece on Canto Bight could have been a little more Star Wars-y, which I think would have blunted accusations that it was boring.
For me, TRoS does NOT get a pass because it was such a blunt and heavy-handed reaction. It didn’t need to have Rose specifically refuse the call to action because
some fans didn’t like herLeia gave her homework. Even if “Big Bad” wasn’t JJ’s preferred direction, it didn’t need to immediately place Kylo Ren back in a subordinate enforcer role. It didn’t need to half-assedly use outtakes of Carrie Fisher when it could have “Ben Kenobi’d” Luke to have a much more engaging training sequence. It didn’t need to literally lift the conflict from some of the worst Expanded Universe stories or the climax from Avengers Endgame. It definitely didn’t need to put half-baked fan theories about Rey’s origins into a hat and then pick one randomly. Everything about it was petty and lazy and so much worse than it needed to be, even if you chafed at TLJ’s choices.Hard disagree on the character arcs. Luke’s arc was terrible. He is completely different than he was at the end of return, and thats ok if you can show how it happened. But it wasn’t really shown just told. The flash back scene with kylo just shows the culmination of this supposed change. We take the guy who would not kill the most evil man when everyone is telling him to because he thinks he can be redeemed, and then go to yeah I had a bad vision I thought we should kill this kid. That’s a jarring change.
If they wanted to set kylo up as the bad guy, the character arc needed more work.
I think red letter put it best on the character arcs poes arc was to learn to blindly obey authority. Finns arc was that nothing he did matters at all and that you should not sacrifice yourself in war.
And I think there is an argument to make that the rRse of Skywalker is in part bad because TLJ was badly written as a middle film. It took payoffs that arguably should be in the final film for itself in an attempt to be different and new. It does not really continue the plot for a third film. The whole movie seemed to jump from moment to moment Rian thought would be cool and did not consider really how to get there. That’s why there are all these consistency issues in lore/suspension of disbelief, theme, tone. If we are building a staircase and in the middle we take the parts for the end of the staircase to try and now make it a spiral staircase I don’t care how pretty it looks or impressive the craftsman ship it does not get me to where I need to go.
I think Rian swung for the fences and I appreciate the attempt but he struck out.
I will die on the hill that while flawed in a lot of ways, TLJ was trying to do something interesting.
I saw the leaked plot of TRoS and refused to watch it.
Finn’s arc for me is irredeemable. By killing Phasma in the middle part of the trilogy they were left with no place to go in the 3rd one for Finn.
I really wanted Phasma back with one burned eye to give Finns story a proper send off and we didn’t even get that.
“Nope! Snoke’s dead! Phasma’s dead! Luke’s dead! Resistance is mostly dead! Good luck with Episode 3 suckers!”
There was a way they COULD have fixed it in post because Fisher died before the film came out. If the whole idea was to kill one original cast member per film, and Fisher died IRL, here’s what you do:
Kill off Leia in space. Don’t give her the Jedi floating angel bit. Do her scenes in the cave at the end as a force ghost.
Play out the rest of the film as normal.
At the start of 3 (or post credit in 2), run Luke’s death scene backwards. Force Ghost Yoda and Leia appear. “Your time, it is not.” Then give the 3rd film over to Luke. There’s your OG cast member for 3.
Killing Phasma was fine. Finn’s arc was never about revenge. It was about finding his path outside of the empire. The obvious conclusions are (a) he fully integrates into the new rebellion, perhaps taking on a leadership role, or (b) he finds that he doesn’t gel there either and chooses a third path. Neither required a showy throw-down with Phasma.
It’s fully on RoS that they chose neither and did nothing with him.
The third movie had all the opportunities in the world to give Finn an arc. Instead they just had him yell “Rey!” a lot.
Even though I have always classified Star Wars firmly as fantasy and not sci-fi, I find the Holdo maneuver utterly unforgivable. TBH Starkiller Base was almost as bad, take the two of them together and intragalactic combat in the Star Wars universe should be instant and apocalyptic. Why even build spaceships when you can just point hyperdrives at your target from any distance, or just laser them from across the galaxy?
Of course I don’t expect the movies to follow this train of thought, but that’s frankly why it’s a problem. The people writing this shlock don’t think about the ramifications for two seconds, they just do what sounds cool and let the fans figure it out. But it really shatters any suspension of disbelief, and exposes how grossly uncurious the writing leads are about the universe they’re crafting. All big movies are profit-driven, but it’s nice to see at least some amount of effort to disguise that fact.
There was no need for Holdo to even do that. They have astromech droids to pilot ships for a reason.
So much of TLJ just failed to make sense. Mostly because Johnson wrote the script himself and didn’t have anyone else review it.
I mentioned before the whole bit with the tracking jewel, which Leia tells Rey can be used to find them anywhere immediately followed in the same scene by the First Order jumping in… “THEY TRACKED US?? THAT’S IMPOSSIBLE!!”
Dude, not only did you just explain how it is POSSIBLE, tracking the Falcon was how the Death Star found Yavin in the very first fucking movie. We KNOW it’s possible.
But beyond that… That whole casino sequence… They are told that in order to get through First Order defenses, they have to find this ONE GUY, a codebreaker at the casino.
Apparently, no, they didn’t need that one guy, it’s easy enough to do that another guy being held in Casino Jail can also do it.
Meanwhile, Rey just floats through the defenses in an escape pod, no codebreaking necessary AT ALL.
Luke shows up at the end, is younger, doesn’t break the salt surface of the planet, and is using a lightsaber previously destroyed, so we know he’s not real…
But before all that, he hands Leia the dice off the Falcon. How can he do that if he’s an intangible force ghost?
Rey also gives Kilo a saber through the force in RoS.
It’s weird, and those things are some of my least favorite additions of the series.
Imagine continuing the trend of brain dead TLJ bitching, and immediately following it up with “I give RoS a pass.”
Completely unserious take my dude.
Last Jedi played like the end of a trilogy leaving no room for a 3rd movie, that’s absolutely Johnson’s fault.
Hey thanks for putting thought into the comment. Agree on most of your points. I like Star Wars and will even rewatch these films even though they aren’t the best.
The only scenes I remember from the whole trilogy are from Last Jedi. Hyperspace blasting a starship into a star destroyer was a cool concept. And the whole final with Luke force projecting across galaxies was a good sendoff I thought.
Rey stealing the Falcon in Force Awakens was a direct rip off of the asteroid escape in Empire and it was EPIC. Well, epic for being a re-hash of Empire, but still very well done, and I think the best single scene from the prequels.
Compare:
https://youtu.be/60dFh008LKo#t=2m07s
with:
https://youtu.be/2r70SDJjwEg#t=1m38s