I’ve heard some pretty smart people say exactly that.
(I don’t think TLJ was a problem… mostly)
Yeah, I’ve heard that too.
What if I told you they’re both bad?
For me it was not the story but the realization that there is no plan to “the saga”. They’re winging it. Maybe the first two trilogies were like that too but I didn’t notice it. With TLJ, I noticed.
Sure, I can get behind that. I disagree that TLJ was “bad”, but it was certainly flawed and I’d know where to start in a conversation.
Yeah. Well after the fact lots of little details that suggested that Lucas had very little idea where the story would go even as the first film or two were being shot came out; major details like Luke and Leia being siblings may not have been in the cards until very late in the game.
But despite a few little mishaps here and there (and his heavyhanded rewriting of large parts of the movies with the Special Editions decades later), a lot of t his wasn’t terribly evident to fans. Maybe it was a matter of a smaller and less well-organized fan culture/entertainment reporting industry back in the day, or maybe it was just a little better when run through Lucas’s brain, even if folks like his ex-wife and Kasdan had heavy influence over time.
But yeah, watching the revolving doors of directors apply their own wildly disparate visions to the new trilogy and outright lampshade hang how badly they’re ignoring prior implications is super annoying as a fan to watch. SW has always had tons of logical inconsistencies and dumb plotting, but somehow, the new trilogy is shining a spotlight on all that that I never experienced before–even with the genuinely terrible Prequel trilogy (which was bad in an entirely upfront way rather than a misguided production process way).
I like a lot of about the new films, but I really hope that the third one ties a neat bow around this shit once and for all. Giving JJ the final say, as much as it pains me to say it, might be the best thing that could have happened to #3.
Well, I’m very thankful for it, since it did the opposite for me. I used to always view Star Wars as entertainment products. TLJ was the first one that made me realize that there was something special about Star Wars that made them more than just entertainment products.
With that said though, I’m just too busy these days to be able to sneak off to another movie. At least through the end of June. Maybe if it’s still in decent theaters in July, and I get a chance, I’ll watch it on the big screen.
I thought it was pretty good! But then I’ve liked every Star Wars movie I’ve seen, which is all of them except the animated Clone Wars thing they put in the theater. There were plenty of double-crosses, guys in jams (not the Hobbesian kind), desperate straits, and no real heroes. It was certainly less epic than the Numbered Episodes. Everyone was expendable (except, of course, for Han and Chewie) but they weren’t sacrificing their lives for the sake of a 5.25" floppy drive like in Rogue One. In the same way, the movie felt expendable. I’m glad I saw it, it felt like a Star Wars movie, but it’s probably my least favorite one at the moment, right behind Episode IV: A New Hope.
If the Scar-facey character Paul Bettany played was the one that Michael K. Williams was supposed to play, I’m very disappointed we didn’t see the Michael K. Williams version. If Michael K. Williams was supposed to play the role that Clint Howard wound up playing, we didn’t miss much.
Gareth Edwards failed to make me care about any character in Rogue One. TLJ was abysmal, and dampened my appreciation of the new characters introduced in Force Awakens. My kids haven’t even mentioned any interest in seeing the Solo movie. They’re 9 & 12. We’re over it. When does Ant Man & Wasp come out?
What in the…?
My kids loved Star Wars when they saw the original trilogy, and they even somehow saw the prequels and loved those. They think the new movies are boring and not fun. These new movies feel as if they’ve been written by an algorithm. Everything is technically perfect and objectively decent Star Wars material, but it has no soul. No one writing these movies has an inkling of human emotion. If we’re being honest, we only liked Force Awakens because of Harrison Ford, who famously ignores scripts he thinks are bad and makes up his own shit. The scenes without Han Solo were poor.
Star Wars merch is rotting on toy shelves, it’s being outsold by Justice League even. Disney has taken the most beloved brand in the history of brands and killed it. Thank God and baby Jesus they are letting Kevin Feige run Marvel Studios without interference, because they’d sure as shit kill that too. Feige obviously loves these characters and hires people who understand how to tell stories with them. Star Wars is being given to JJ fucking Abrams again, who fucked up Star Trek despite getting an all star cast who were perfect in their roles.
I’m gonna go even further and say Indiana Jones 4, which was super shitty, was better than any new Star Wars movie. If you can endure the Lucas-isms, Shia Laboof swinging with monkeys, and Marian being on meth or whatever, they wrote a good story and had a fun adventure. With aliens, who doesn’t like aliens?
It’s incredible, everything you said is exactly wrong.
Citation needed. Star Wars merch is rotting on the shelves, but I think that’s because of the pace of these movies. There’s definitely some fatigue there with movies coming out annually and driving new waves of toys. But I would be very surprised to find it’s being outsold by JL.
Spoiler, it’s not. Not by a long shot.
My data set is the toy section of Target in Everett, MA. Also the backpacks, tshirts, and lunchboxes I see at my kid’s school. Minecraft, Marvel and DC super heroes, Sponge Bob, Pokemon, no kid gives a shit about Star Wars anymore. They’ve killed the brand.
Today I learned Star Wars merchandise is made out of organic materials with very short shelf lives.
If Star Wars LEGOs were cheaper I’d own them all.
Obviously gamersgaters were right about the new Star Wars movies and the problem of casting female leads. Kids are horribly sexist, and racist, and droidist.
That’s not the problem at all. Rey and Kylo Ren are great characters, because the actors playing them are great. The problem is the scripts are uninspired shit created by marketing AIs.
Rogue One has the opposite problem, a decent story (because they had the easy task of leading into the good Star Wars material) but characters that were generated by the marketing AI and flat actors behind them.
I thought TFA was okay, kinda liked Rouge One, and was bored out of my skull by TLJ, but I’m actually looking forward to seeing this one enough to buy a ticket on opening weekend.