The “fan backlash” is fully towards Rise of Skywalker as a response to fan hatred for The Last Jedi. It’s stupid.
Fans didn’t like the “Let the past die. Kill it if you have to” plot of The Last Jedi, so J.J. Abrams responded by trying to answer the questions that The Last Jedi didn’t. I just feel like The Last Jedi didn’t set up any interesting story points for the next movie to build off of: Luke Skywalker is dead. The Resistance is all but wiped out. I feel like the only setup for the next movie was those Jedi textbooks that Rey hadn’t read.
Luke Skywalker had become a Force Ghost, continuing to follow in the path of his teachers, and put in a unique position to haunt his former student and nephew and perhaps nag him back to the Light Side of the Force. The Resistance had barely weathered their strongest challenge and had cast about different sparks that were blowing into zealous flames. (For instance, Finn was now a rebel, not just a deserter.) Kylo Ren had inherited the mantle of power of a terrifying star kingdom, and how would he use it? Chewie was starting to step into his own role instead of just Han’s sidekick. And so on.
One of the really stupid things about the resistance being cut back to about 20 is considering the population of the galaxy.
I looked it up and Corsucant alone is 500 billion to 1 trillion beings, about half of which are human.
That was just the leadership of the resistance that happened to be on the planet that was attacked. I’m sure there’s resistance pockets on hundreds of worlds. But you needed someone from that leadership pocket to survive to carry forward the lessons and to help organize, and to re-ignite hope in the every day man and the budding talent of the mop boys of the galaxy.
I really love the Luke Skywalker haunting Kylo as a force ghost idea. It’s a cool twist. It’s a shame Abram’s didn’t use it. Especially considering Luke’s last words to Kylo before he disappears.
He really didn’t watch The Last Jedi.
What sparks? What flames? The whole “we will be the spark that will light the fire of revolution” metaphor didn’t really go anywhere. Holdo couldn’t have been talking about Rose and Finn, because she didn’t know about their side mission to Canto Bight. And when they were cornered in the base and called for help, no one answered. Unless they were hoping to act as martyrs, I don’t see how their almost complete destruction would inspire anyone.
It just bothers me that almost the entire Resistance fleet was destroyed over the course of the movie, while the heroes remained miraculously unharmed.
So that is actually one of the things I disliked about TLJ (and almost all the new films, in general), is that they make the Star Wars galaxy so small. In theory, Star Wars is an endless universe, but for some reason, most of Disney’s creators have trapped themselves into telling small stories.
IMO - and I may be totally off-base about this - what made Star Wars the success it became, is because the films depicts what feels like real worlds. It’s dirty, down to earth and when we travel around the galaxy with Luke, Han and Leia, it is relatively easy to imagine that there are thousands of other worlds out there. The OT shows us part of the world, but it hints at a galaxy that is so much wider and complex than what is shown; e.g., when Han Solo talks about the Kessel Run, Obi Wan talks about the clone wars, or the bartender tells Luke that droids are forbidden in the bar, we see the hints of a wider galaxy outside of the films. And for all their faults, the prequels still worked, because even as they fleshed out some of the backstory of the OT, they expanded the universe further.
The sequel trilogy completely fails in that respect. It starts cutting away the politics that was supposedly in the story (the New Republic) and its razor sharp focus on the “Resistance”, making this story about a marignal tiny group of people within a huge galaxy. It then compounds it’s problems due to JJ’s inability to comprehend basic physics. It’s obvious that Han and Rey should be unable to see the Republic capital blow up - but apart from the absurdity of the thing, it also makes the galaxy feel small when our heroes on some backwater planet can visually see what happens in the galactic center (compare and contrast with Kenobi and the destruction of Alderaan).
TLJ makes the universe even smaller. The Hyperspace battle in TLJ literally takes place over less than 24 hours. In that period, Finn manages to travel back and forth to an entirely different planet (before leaving, Poe tells Finn that they have 18 hours of fuel left) and infiltrate the First Order fleet. Rey teleports from Luke’s hideaway planet to the same fleet within that same period (compare and contrast with ESB, where time is visibly shown to pass between Luke leaving Dagobah and arriving at Bespin). Basically - distance has no meaning in the sequels - it’s literally harder for me to travel from Europe to the US on earth, than it is for Finn and Rey to travel across the galaxy. And of course, by the end of the movie, the Resistance is basically non-existent (though JJ pretty much ignores that completely in RoS).
RoS of course sins in other ways, by bending everything back to Skywalker vs Palpatine. The entire sequel trilogy thus ends up being a myopically small story, in a small galaxy that feels smaller than Earth, about two families fighting over who will rule it. TFA was focused way too much on resembling the OT, and at the end of the day, neither TLJ nor RoS did anything to effectively expand the Star Wars universe. Which is why - IMO - Disney is now left with nothing to build upon, and seem to be unable to do anything but prequel movies and series.
Thank you for linking that. It took me a few days, but I got through the whole 3rd movie in comic form. That’s a great end to the trilogy. Much better than the one we got. Now granted, the one we got had a couple of elements that I preferred to this version, like keeping the connection going between Rey and Kylo from the 2nd movie, instead of severing that tie. But other than that, I liked so many more aspect’s of Treverrow’s version. Finn and Rose had such a huge role in that version, and it nicely fills out Finn’s arc from the first movie. Good stuff.
This is spot on, for me. The Entire SW experience when I was a kid was just three films, the last one mirroring the basic premise of the first, and yet I spent ten years obsessing about it. I reread the SW sourcebooks more times than I watched the movies, because they filled in details of a vast galaxy that inspired the imagination and provided so much room to explore in your mind. The little trickle of SW stuff that came out in the decade run up to the sequels, like Heir to the Empire, Xwing games, Dark Horse and Marvel comics, technical manuals etc did a better job expanding the world than these films do.
(Although that sequel of Dark Empire fell into its own shadow, too. Sometimes you gotta know when to pass the torch.)
Don’t know if I would call it great, because there are some elements in there that just don’t sit well with me. But it resolves the Rey’s family mystery box from the first film in a more satisfactory manner, redeems Luke further, and has some satisfactory callbacks to the old films (Plagueis, the temple, the Storm Troopers, etc). Also the action sort of makes sense and the resolution kind of satisfactory. The Poe-Rey romance would have been an awful idea, though. They’ve hardly spoken three words to each other in the first two films, they have very little chemistry (esp. compared to the tension with both Ben and Finn); Finn-Poe have far more romantic tension between them than Rey and Poe.
It’s a far better end than the one we got, for sure - and it doesn’t invalidate the entire 8th film. I am not a fan of TLJ, but pretty much retconning everything about it, the way RoS does was so dumb.
I’m actually glad to hear that; I’d assumed they were quietly cancelled. Now, they’re still eventually going to be made! Unless they never get around to it.
I hope they get made too. I’d love for him to return to this universe.
This sounds like a soft kill. “We aren’t cancelling it, but he’s just really busy with his other franchise.”
So Knives Out grossed a worldwide $311M, which is quite good for that kind of movie I would think. My guess is the potential of a new Star Wars triology would dwarf that, though. So there’s either more to this announcement or Johnson isn’t motivated by money.
Netflix gave him a truckload of money for Knives Out 2.
I believe it was for KO 2 and 3.
And more importantly, they signed him to the deal BEFORE the Star Wars people could agree to terms. So now the Star Wars people have to either wait or find someone else.
I’m pleased they will wait for the right person and not just play musical directors/scriptwriters to force something out and get revenue ASAP.
I don’t think Rian is this person. However, I have more hope that he can turn out a good group of films that are his from the beginning rather than he did by yanking the emergency brake and going full reverse in the middle of an ongoing series. Not a lot more, but more for sure. And would be quite happy to be wrong with my reservations.