Huh. I’d call TLJ the first interesting SW film since Empire. TFA was typical Abrams—ok in the moment but brain dead beyond forgiveness as you start to think about it as the lights come up. Lazy writing even by his standards, and I don’t just mean the “copying ANH” thing. Solo was straight up awful. Rogue One had great potential and didn’t live up to it, but was OK. Gave me Star Wars Feels a couple times, which is more than I can say for any of the others but TLJ (only one to achieve the thing where they make you care a ton about several rebel pilots, and characterize them, by giving you about 3 seconds with each, since Empire, and the best of that since ANH).
I loved TFA because of the nostalgia, sure it copied many things. But history itself repeats sometimes. I thought it was a good way to reignite the story by having familiar elements.
Rogue one is my favorite thing so far out of Disney SW. It was so dark, and unexpected. Basically Hamlet in space. Would love for more of that, and i have high hopes for the mandalorian.
The fact that it was nothing like 1-3 is it's saving grace and no creature like jar-jar showed up. Though I was kind of hoping Snopes would end up being Jar-Jar because it could be the only explanation why Lucas would put that baffling idiot in there if he was really a brilliant Sith lord in disguise.
> I loved TFA because of the nostalgia, sure it copied many things. But history itself repeats sometimes. I thought it was a good way to reignite the story by having familiar elements.
It's a fun watch, like Abrams' Star Trek reboot, but has the same problem of extremely lazy plotting. Not that the original trilogy never ever has something happen purely because it's convenient for the writer and they can't be bothered to think of something better, but that's the underlying motivation for a lot of the writing in TFA and Abrams' other films, while it's usually rare or absent in a well-plotted film, including the original trilogy.
He'll even, sometimes, write in nonsense because it's convenient, then have to come up with other nonsense to find an excuse to get rid of the first nonsense, without bothering to try to make any of that seem reasonable or natural. Example: Han and Chewie show up in a big ship just because we need them to be here now and can't be bothered to write them into the plot some more natural way that doesn't require introducing a new ship, but we don't need that big ship around past this scene because it only exists in the first place for the writer's convenience in the moment, so we'll just... make up some plot-irrelevant reason for them to abandon it suddenly, at exactly the time we need them to. Boom, problem—which we created due to laziness—solved, by applying more laziness! It's basically a whole movie of that, ground up, from a plot perspective, and it really grates once you notice it.
About the best thing I can say about Abrams is he runs one of the the best casting operations in the business and seems to be a good director of actors. I mean, damn. And he's about 100x better than, say, Michael Bay at creating good, popcorn-dumb but not dumb dumb or hard-to-follow-for-no-reason-but-laziness, action scenes. He's no master of action, but he does entirely serviceable work, which is more than a lot of directors manage. His plot writing is just god awful technically speaking. About as bad as it can be without suffering outright incoherence.
TLJ is the movie that finally broke the camel's back and let me decide to never ever give Disney another dollar for anything Star Wars until they fix it. Every single promising scene was ruined by a misplaced bad joke or intentionally stupid bad guys(so the movie would not end within 5 minutes, including the opening). The rest was so inconsistent with itself and the older movies that nothing in SW makes sense anymore.
Disney has managed to kill all my enthusiasm I ever had for SW with a single movie. TLJ felt like an attempt to show how little they care about fans of the older movies imho.
>Huh. I’d call TLJ the first interesting SW film since Empire.
I agree, and I think time will eventually come to agree as well. TFA was visually interesting as all of the modern Star Wars films were, but plot-wise it was such an obvious fanservice-laden rehash of ANH that it left me unsatisfied. Yes, seeing Han Solo again engaging in space pirate shenanigans was fun, but another Death Star, just bigger this time, really?
TLJ actually tried to say something new and push the lore forward (in a direction a lot of fans didn't like, but still, no longer circling the drain of decades-year-old nostalgia.) I liked what it had to say about the nature of the Force and how the Jedi and Sith were both wrong, I like that Luke turned out to be a flawed character cynical about his mythical status as a hero, and that there is more than just the binary morality of "Jedi good, Sith bad, let's fight now" at play.
My biggest criticism of TLJ would be that, while I enjoyed it as a movie, I think it failed at its role as the second part of a trilogy, spending too much time undermining the previous movie. Although, as far as I know, that's because there never was an "arc" planned for this trilogy, so I don't even know how much blame TLJ can get for deviating from a plan which never existed.
I get a bad feeling that Rise of Skywalker is going to wind up being nothing but a fix-fic for the last two parts, though.
Kathleen Kennedy (the Star Wars Kevin Feige) wouldn't have allowed Rian Johnson to wreck any plans for Star Wars, and JJ Abrams had plenty of time to object if he thought TLJ was going to step on any ideas for its sequel.
My biggest criticism of TLJ was that I think it did the intended arc justice, but I didn't enjoy it on its own as a single movie. (Some of that is because I accidentally sort of double featured it with Three Billboards and Three Billboards entirely broke Poe Dameron as a character for me.)
I don't have any expectations for Rise of Skywalker yet. Waiting for reviews.
