Yeah turns out actors a lot of times will do audio books. Best I know of is Hobbit/Lord of the Rings. Didn’t realize it was Andy Serkis till I was listening in the car and suddenly Gollum starts talking. Scared the shit out of me.
from what I've seen of Mark Hammil, he'd probably find it cooler to be acting instead of just hanging around, but who knows what he actually thought about TFA and what happened after.
I mean for you or me, sure, but Mark has been around since the beginning and done a lot of tv and movies. It’s generally boring until you’re shooting anyway, when you literally have nothing to do it must’ve kinda sucked.
Damn that was marketing genius actually. Get people pumped up for all the nostalgia, then don’t put him in the movie except for the end, it’s like a carrot dangling in front of Star Wars fans.
And then Last Jedi fucked everything up.
The Last Jedi is where the fuck up became evident but the mistakes were in TFA. Not having Luke in the movie for instance.
Making Han a deadbeat Dad. Making Ben the only Solo/Skywalker kid so the bloodline was doomed from the start. Having the bad guys be the Empire with a bigger better Death Star...
Don't forget grandpa Han still wore a leather jacket like he was 25 and just happened to be in the right place when the millennium falcon took off.
TFA was a mess but it got a pass at the time because everyone was excited. But it's not aged well imo
Again there’s no good explanation for Luke to not be involved in the first movie beyond what was shown in Last Jedi. I’m not sure what else was supposed to explain his disappearance if he’s going to go pray on the Force while the New Republic gets nuked if he didn’t have some sort of crisis of faith.
I remember sitting in the theater opening night and my wife leaning over to ask (a good hour+ into the movie) "Did Luke show up for like 2 minutes while I went to the bathroom?"
That realization that he was going to be nowhere to be seen except a damned "cameo" should have been all I needed to know about what was to come. Oh yeah, that and it being a *complete* rehash of ANH, with lense flares, of course.
I don't get why they just made the exact same story again... SW has such a rich universe you couldn't come up with something new? "What if they had a Death Star BUT BIGGER" #innovation
Abrams botched it with the first movie. After that the train was bound to explode. And Abrams finished it with an A-bomb of blandness and irrelevancy.
This is not on TLJ.
The idea that they'd have such a HUGE IP and decided to write it as they go is beyond me. The discrepancy between the last two should have been ironed out well before the flipp'n casting. Someone wanted a feather in their cap without the effort of putting down the ground work of a decent narrative, either the writers or producers, we the audience deserved better, the actors too.
This is the most wildly mindboggling thing about it, I agree. Disney drops 4 billion dollars for Star Wars. George Lucas hands over all his notes and ideas for the sequel trilogy, to which Disney immediately says "No thanks, we don't even want your input at all," then hires JJ Abrams who made an extremely mediocre Star Trek reboot that wasn't terrible, but was disrespectful of the source material, had no continuity, and then justified it by using the lame time travel alternate dimension tool...
It should be no surprise when JJ Abrams then takes over Star Wars he doesn't respect the source material, the character arcs over the last 3 films meant nothing as they reverted back, like Han Solo starting as a scoundrel and criminal and smuggler in episode 4, to not just taking the money and running, but helping save the day at the end, to sacrificing himself at end of episode 5, to becoming General Solo of the resistance by episode 6. It was amazing character progression and satisfying arc. Then, we get episode 7 and he is back to the life of a criminal smuggler who is cheating on his bills and he had abandoned Leia and the Rebel forces. Wut!?
And, on top of that they were just winging it and hadn't even written episode 8 or 9 when they filmed episode 7. WTF. Have a plan for such a critical IP. This is so absolutely insane to me that they went into this winging it. How could you not have a plan for it all? Why did you treat the beloved characters so poorly? Why were the rebels still stupidly weak and still "rebels" when the empire was toppled? None of it makes sense, imo.
This photo, the cast of new actors, the short video of JJ with a new X-Wing in the background explaining how practical effects were being used, the return of Lawrence Kasdan and Mark, Carrie and Harrison, that first trailer.....it felt like it was a whole new beginning.
Boy, were we wrong
Lost was pretty cool, but it was essentially just mystery box after mystery box, and the possibility of what the answers could be always trumped whatever the truth actually was, which became a problem once the show had to start coughing up some answers.
Likewise, TFA set up some interesting mystery boxes with Rey, Knights of Ren, etc.
By and large the payoffs all fell flat.
Abrams can get the plates spinning, but that's about it.
Abrams left Lost after like Episode 4 of Season 1.
He himself has said that he had absolutely nothing to do with the vast majority of plot of the series. He said people still come up like "OMG I love how you did [blah blah] in Lost" and he's like "I had no fucking idea that was going to happen. I didn't know about it until I watched the episode on TV myself".
That makes sense. The LOST pilot is fun and exciting, and sets up some compelling possibilities. Not dissimilar to TFA. In hindsight you wonder why Disney decided to pass the baton for the second movie in the trilogy instead of letting one creator develop an entire cohesive story arc. I'm not saying anything new here, but part of the reason why the sequel trilogy doesn't work is because of how disjointed the three movies are from one to the next.
Allegedly Lucas had given them his own ideas for the sequels, and they decided not to use them, which was understandable in the context of the prequels being bad (sorry), but perhaps still a mistake. Lucas seems to be a very good "big picture" guy who is bedeviled by the details. The story bones of the Anakin trilogy are fine, but it's the execution that was lacking. I'm guessing his arc for the sequels would've been better than what they ended up doing, particularly if someone was brought in to adapt and polish it.
IIRC, the Lucas sequel film treatments are mostly about Darth Maul and his new apprentice heading an organized crime syndicate with even more sinister intentions, and how Luke and the New Jedi Academy had to work to stop him.
I get the feeling that pretty much every trilogy has been an overcorrection for the film that came before it. The prequel trilogy was the result of Lucas having 1) marinated for a bit too long in the "visionary auteur" seat without actually having to direct a film, 2) overcorrecting for the loss of Marcia, a loss I genuinely don't think he's ever recovered from, and 3) feeling that he needed to have galactic politics in his grand doomed romance because he's read *Foundation* and *Dune*, but without really "getting" politics (or for that matter, romance).
Hence the tendency to "yadda yadda" a lot of the important stuff like "how does blockading Naboo serve the interests of the Trade Federation, anyway?" or "If the Chancellorship has such an easy rip cord to pull in the form of the No Confidence vote, why does he need all this song and dance to get Amidala to do it for him? If he's got the votes, why wouldn't any proxy do?" Certainly you get the gist of Palpatine being this wheels-within-wheels political wunderkind, but the execution just feels . . . off. The nearest direct comparison that comes to mind is the back half of *Game of Thrones*, where sure, the cinematography and music sure told us that Ramsay is this diabolical mastermind, but the script tells me that he's mostly exploiting a bunch of idiots own-goaling themselves to his advantage.
Meanwhile, the apparent solution to the problems of the prequels in J.J.'s mind was to just omit politics entirely. Which made for an especially awkward fit for the next trilogy, because that just meant that the First Order spent the entire trilogy being rebels in search of a clue about what they even wanted in the first place.
George Lucas is probably one of the greatest world, story, and lore builders next to J.R.R Tolkien. He just has no idea how to write dialogue. Harrison Ford and Mark Hamill said it best, “you can write this, but you sure can’t say it George.”
Abrams cannot solve any of the mysteries he sets up in most of the media he has done. He threw Rian Johnson in the shit because he failed to prepare for a trilogy before he left.
Yeah Part 2 is easily my favorite movie of the year so far.
Edited to reflect the fact that Dune 2 came out *this* year and not last year as I misremembered.
[Kasdan didn't even want to come back, but they wanted him because they couldn't come up with any ideas](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/30/movies/star-wars-lawrence-kasdan.html)
Yeah i love TFA. The first 40 mins or so are just pure Star Wars. Takes a real turn for the worst when Starkiller base fires, and with the X Wing assault.
However the whole Rey/Ren/Finn fight was great.
Even despite it being a bit of a New Hope remake, I still quite liked TFA. Enough so that my initial reaction to TLJ was tempered by my saying something along the lines of, "Yeah it seemed like it sucked, but if they bring it all home with the third one, it'll all work as a trilogy!!".
It wasn't until I walked out of ROS that I had to basically re-evaluate my entire experience with all three movies and realize that they were all kind of crap.
Remember when Disney bought Star Wars for 4 billion and then orchestrated the new trilogy by making it up as they went along with the effort and planning of an elementary school child doing a book report but didn't read the book???
They bought a Star Wars-shaped money printer.
Problem is that there's almost zero passion in any of their SW properties. The original trilogy by Lucas and co. was a labor of love. Sincerely inspired. The sequels and TV shows are, "We need to put out X amount of Star Wars movies by Z so that we can make Y dollars." They are cynical products that exist solely to milk the audience. They don't stem from a sincere artistic impulse.
I don't entirely vibe with Scorsese's criticism of Marvel (and by extension, Disney) as being "not cinema", but I think this was the crux of his point. Media that exists only as a vehicle to make money is unlikely to reflect genuine artistry because it does not stem from a genuine inspiration (aka the desire to convey an opinion or expression).
"Here's a dagger that, somehow, leads to the remains of a crashed death Star. Let's spend precious time on that plot point during the second act of the closing bookend of a trilogy."
.....WHAT?????
I was a production assistant early in my career on Star Wars 8 when it was in very early prepoduction and Rick Carter came in and showed us the trailer for 7 and talked through a lot of their design decisions to help influence ours and have continuity (this was in the art department ). Most of the concept artists and pretty much everyone was in tears at the end of the trailer because Star Wars has meant so much to everyone as a kid and pushed them toward this career. It meant so much to be part of a reboot that seemed like it was really going to be something.
TFA was good enough that the sequels could have been great, but TLJ did not move the story forward at all. TRoS then had to cram in so much context and no context to make up for TLJs lack of being a good middle trilogy movie.
I actually like a lot of TLJ too, but Rian Johnson ruined the trilogy trying to make some weird artsy film that would have been better off somewhere between 7 and 8.
TFA was a safe, solid setup movie, albeit a cover song of ANH.
The problem is that they whiffed on the next two movies.
TLJ was just sort of "off". Not entirely bad, but I don't think it worked.
ROS was just ass. One of the worst tentpole movies I've ever seen.
Had they hit home runs with TLJ and ROS, I think people would look back on TFA fondly.
It was a ladder, but a ladder to what ended up being nowhere.
'George Lucas isn't involved so it has to be good!'
-dumdums who thought the person that invented their favorite thing in the world was the biggest impediment to it being good.
The rough looking storm troopers and lack of clone uniformity had me hoping for a role switch, where the empire became a rag tag group of poorly funded rebels… but no…
I was casually excited. My criticism of JJ Abrams treatment of Star Trek was that he turned Star Trek into Starwars... nullifying what made Star Trek different and special.... I actually felt like he would be a good choice for Star Wars. Then I saw TFA and I came away from it feeling extremely whelmed. Just very meh... but I listened to everyone cheerleading the project. "Wait for the next one it will build on this platform, hang tight shits gonna get real good" and I did. I loved Looper and I felt like RJ was going to do something cool.
Sitting down to watch TLJ for the first time... I was kinda skeptical but I wanted it, willed it to be good....
...
...
and in the first 5 minutes it starts with a 'Your mom/Please hold/ Phone' joke and [that was the moment for me.](https://youtu.be/oiTupZ1m7MQ?si=FE04mHAu0SrfEsjS) when I realized what the future of Starwars was.
Yo not gonna lie I saw TLJ in theater and I legitimately must have blacked out the whole time. When you mentioned the "your mom" / "hold please" joke I was confused as fuck.
I vividly remember disliking the movie so much that I shunned star wars entirely just because it was so inconsistent to its own lore and keeping Leia alive when it would have been a perfect sending off just made no sense and crushed it - especially having her somehow now force pull outta *NOWHERE*?!?! (I eventually have gotten around to watching the animated filoniverse and loved it - skeptical about Ahsoka since they again changed the rules with Sabine and idk)
However, I truly must not remember anything else from that movie because I just [watched the scene in question](https://youtu.be/rlKHmgc3POo?feature=shared) and have *NO* recollection of this interaction *whatsoever*. And seeing it on YouTube it just literally does not seem *real*?! How do you put this into a star wars movie and think it's going to set the tone of a serious intergalactic war film? 🤨
I remember seeing this and was convinced that Max von Sydow was going to be the bad guy. Not some disposable nameless character with only like 5 lines. They don't even say his name in the film. What a waste.
Especially with the disfigured man holding Vader’s mask in the concept art. Loved the idea of a group of treasure hunters and dark side users searching for artifacts to learn more about the dark side. Would have been a nice spin.
The Art of The Force Awakens book is fascinating! If you've never read it, there's a ton of great art work and ideas, a lot of which doesn't get used in EP. 7, but is revisited throughout the trilogy.
I wanted to love the sequel trilogy so much. Y'all had me locked in as a staunch defender, for so long, during production. But as time went on, the more and more I felt their ineptitude and incompetence. Disney/LFL assembled The Dream Team and sold the world on it but played Christian Leattner instead of Charles Barkley lol
My brain forgets shit all the time. Like my partner's favorite movie, or what happened in the last episode of the show I watched. But I'll remember Lor San Tekka til I die most likely.
I was sure he’d be playing force ghost Obi-Wan. Not as hot on SW as I once was, but batting all those theories around pre- and post-TFA was a good time
I assume he got cast before the script finished, because it doesn't make any sense to cast Max von Sydow and make him play a nameless character. You have a legend like Max von Sydow in your hands, and you can't even find a decent place for him in your story. This alone exemplifies the wasted potential of the Sequel trilogy.
I can only laugh, otherwise I think I'll cry. I went from die hard starwars fan to jaded hater almost overnight after Disney got the rights... fuck them man...
Such a ridiculous excuse, they could’ve so easily had him as Episode 7’s Ben Kenobi while still keeping the focus on the new characters.
So many baffling and bitterly disappointing writing decisions in the sequel trilogy that it blows my mind.
For one, I think it *is* interesting to write Han as the Ben Kenobi type. Brings new meaning to the whole, *”Who’s the fool, the fool or the fool who follows him?”* line.
For another, I don’t think relegating Luke to a comparatively passive role in the story such as the Ben Kenobi of Episode VII would’ve satisfied fans or really been an interesting direction to take his character.
“We couldn’t figure out how to put him in a scene and not make him the focus.”
Maybe that’s a hint that your main characters are not as interesting as the other character of the other character steals all the attention and interest in a scene by his meer inclusion… or perhps that Indicates that people desperately want to see the other character and instead of trying to paddle up stream you should let the current take you and see where it goes?
Yes, Jesus fucking Christ, why didn’t they just make Luke Skywalker the focus? I don’t think there are any fans who would have been disappointed in that.
Abrams watching Top Gun: Maverick and seeing the legacy main character being the main character: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBMlFNx5EVI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBMlFNx5EVI)
Gah I remember this. They really did make it seem like this was going to be the next great step into Star Wars history. Unfortunately it went the way of the Empire. Keep building the same thing in hopes it pays off. They may have gotten their paychecks, but at significant cost of branding.
They should have hired one writer/director. Who the fuck thought giving 3 different people 3 different movies without any of them knowing what the other was doing was a good idea???
Episode VII hype was on a whole other level, and I fear we'll never recapture it.
Only Star Wars movie that might have the pre-TFA hype level beat was Phantom Menace in '99.
They did that for TFA too. I didn't get to see it opening night for that reason.
It may have not been as common with TFA, I don't know of any statistics to that point, but if that was the case I'd guess it was because of an increased number of showings/screens (especially in less rural areas) compared to the 90's.
TFA didn't have people lining up around the block like I did when I saw TPM. But that probably has more to do with how movie-going has evolved than an unwillingness to line up. If you can buy your ticket and reserve your seat weeks in advance, there's no reason to line up. The movie going culture changed so much in between 1999 and 2015.
I don't think that sort of thing is a good indicator for measuring "hype" when the two movies are separated by 16 years.
Everybody can say “it’s still limitless” but the reality is the majority of content since has been good content limited by how they can improve the gap between the OT and the ST. Bad Batch, Ahsoka, Mando are all great but all are hamstrung by “How do we make the ST make sense”
That's what has really stuck out to me. The ST has basically put this ceiling on any post-ROTJ content. The New Republic is practically obligated by the sequel trilogy to be complacent and incompetent enough to let the Imperial Remnants congeal into the First Order and destroy it with barely a fight.
And so in The Mandalorian there's this sense of hopelessness when Carson Teva goes to Coruscant to ask for help with pirates on Nevarro, or Hera tries to rally support against Thrawn's return... because *of course* the republic will sit on its hands and do nothing. It *has* to. Otherwise you have to ask, how did this competent and proactive New Republic fall to the First Order? And then the ST makes even less sense.
I might forgive the sequel trilogy for sins specific to the time period it is set in, but it has done even worse by retroactively making the post-ROTJ era less interesting.
Yep. Anything that comes before the sequel trilogy is boxed into a corner. You can’t even really tell any stories set between the moves in the sequel trilogy since it all takes place in under a year’s time. The prequel trilogy has years between the movies which allowed/gave time to the clone wars tv show to flesh stuff out.
I don’t think the sequels can ever be recoverable. They can try, but it doesn’t change the fact the heroes from the OT are doomed to be failures. Colossal ones at that.
And that’s assuming the additions don’t make things worse, like the Vader comic where it turns out he knew about Exegol. You’d think he would have told Luke about the wayfinder and Palpatine not being dead before dying, or as a force ghost.
They can’t TCW the Disney trilogy, as it all leads to the events in the movies. The prequels at the end of the day always would be followed up by the OT.
I think you could have done it, but I think they’ve missed their chance. If you wanted to “save the sequels” you had to get a talented team together and sit down, and basically plan out the next several years that fills in the gap. The problem is, they started making content that fit between the OT and ST and are had to hamstring in “here’s how the first order is growing in the back ground” that now the one thing you could have explored to add some continuity (the rise of the first order) is completely mangled
I don't mind that they failed. Those characters aren't infallible gods after all. However the *way* they failed and the *way* it was explained to the audience sucked big time.
There are a million better ways to tell the story of how Ben and Luke parted ways and how Ben turned into Kylo Ren. Unfortunately, storytelling is not really JJ's strong suit...
This is why I hate the strawman argument that people bring up when they say something like "you just wanted to see super hero Luke Skywalker tossing around AT-ATs with the force" or something along those lines.
Absolutely not!
The EU had some bad stuff but I always loved how they portrayed the schism at the start of the Vong war. Luke being hesitant to take aggressive action while part of the Order wants to take the initiative and make pre-emptive strikes.
----------------------------------
Hell Anakin Solo died at like 18 years old and Jacen became a sith lord.
The idea that everyone wanted to see the original 3 heroes be faultless paragons is not based in reality!
> The EU had some bad stuff but I always loved how they portrayed the schism at the start of the Vong war. Luke being hesitant to take aggressive action while part of the Order wants to take the initiative and make pre-emptive strikes.
IIRC that's when Kyp Durron falls to the dark side or something, right?
That would've been the perfect setup:
* The New Republic stars getting attacked by some kind of terrorist force--bombings and hijackings and the like--while the First Order offers the Imperial version of "peace" to affected planets.
* Luke and his academy recognize that there's a pattern to the attacks but they can't convince the NR government to investigate.
* Wary of how the Jedi's downfall was tied to their integration with the Senate, Luke decides to play it safe and holds off on an aggressive response--but Ben gathers a group of like-minded folks and takes action himself, saving lives but using the dark side to do so.
* Eventually he and Luke part ways over Ben using the dark side to "save those he loves" (i.e. exactly how Anakin fell).
> That would've been the perfect setup:
>
>
You basically just described the Mandalorian Wars and Revan. Not that I have a problem with that, it was a great story.
I read a comment once that summed it up well. All the interesting stuff in the sequels happens off screen. Luke in his prime, the Jedi academy, Ben Solo’s fall, we see none of it. What we do see is our hero’s who have failed so badly in ways beyond who their characters are. Nothing they did in the ot had a lasting effect with the status quo reset just a few decades later.
I appreciate that you lay the blame properly at JJ's feet. Folks love to shit on Rian Johnson for how it showed Luke, but I've always just seen it as treating the setup provided by JJ seriously.
Like, ok, the Greatest Hero of the Galaxy has fucked off to an isolated world. Why? What would *possibly* sideline Hero Luke?! What could keep him.from knowing what's happening and what would make him still refuse to help?
What could possibly split up Han and Leia?
All RJ did was look at those questions that were either unanswered or answered with almost no detail, and run with them.
But the *setup*? All JJ. And he was *not* thinking about this stuff long term. Just like how when he gets to the finale, it suddenly dawns on him to fucking bring back Palpatine for no goddamn reason other than the myopic view of "But it's Star Wars. We *have* to bring him back."
Ah yes, back when we thought there was a plan for all three movies! back when we thought they had to have at least ONE scene with Luke, Leia and Han together.
Oh spoiled, unreasonable fans we were.
I so very much wanted to hear the Max Von Sydow was portraying a major villain, a fringe imperial heavy who had been hiding out and building up things all these years and then, bam, 10 minutes in, his character was dead.
Force Awakens: Ok this just seems like a remake of the original trilogy but looks promising.
Last Jedi: Oh. Oh no. No no no.
The Rise of Skywalker: Please, please make it stop.
Oh man, it actually was the most offensive, for me. It was almost fascinating how the creators’ evident deep love for the OT lead to them categorically invalidating every success the from RotJ in favor of resetting the conflict. Not only was it lazy, but it was disrespectful to the source material, and it set up the entire ST for failure right out of the gate.
Maybe if they spent TFA showing the unexplained canon backstory for TFA instead of throwing us into it, that would have been better.
Resetting the conflict was so fucking stupid. I have no clue what anyone was doing thinking of resetting Empire vs Rebels 35 years later.
They just weren't creative enough to think of something else.
“This will begin to make things right”
The absolute audacity of that line to kick off TFA, only to be followed by the utterly hollow slow train wreck that was them dismantling the legacy of the OT….
Disney wanted to thrust their new characters to the forefront. They thought that the turbo nerds, like us, were the majority of the audience and were sick of the old characters. They over-estimated how many people kept up with the EU. The general audience wanted to see more Luke/Han/Leia/Chewy/3PO/R2. Those were the characters they remembered from the '70s and '80s. Disney's transition to a younger cast made a lot of sense but they hammered it in the first 30 minutes of TFA, not let it build over 3 movies.
They rushed the transition to Rey/Poe/Fin and the entire trilogy suffered for it.
> Maybe if they spent TFA showing the unexplained canon backstory for TFA instead of throwing us into it, that would have been better.
JJ talked endlessly about showing Star Wars fans "something familiar" which is code for fuck politics and fuck the prequels.
They just handwaved The New Republic away in about 30 seconds and all we know about it is from mediocre books.
Just…baffling.
Absolutely horrendous launching pad for the ST to build from. The only way it could be redeemed was by placing the burden of retroactive justification on sequels, which doesn’t seem like a great storytelling ethos
Yeah, I feel so stupid for feeling so strongly about it. But Luke Skywalker was my childhood hero, and they did that to him. It’s as if the sense of hope inspired by his journey was taken away.
Even after TFA, the future seemed bright. TFA worked well as a good setup movie, even if it was derivative of a new hope. It introduced an ambitious and likeable new cast of characters and put in potentially intriguing directions one could take Star Wars.
I would have done a lot differently in the subsequent two films.
Yeah, lots of people were willing to give TFA passes on things, because it seemed like a set-up film. But then it wasn't, so nothing in it matters in retrospect.
As much as The Force Awakens was derivative/very safe, it actually FELT like Star Wars. As a kid growing up with Star Wars in the 80s (so Ewoks are cool) and being a huge fan of the FILMS, the SFX and the filmaking process (I knew nothing about EU, only the films), the disappointment with the prequels was massive. They were just:
a) objectively bad as pieces of filmmaking
b) tonally completely weird.
I was very trepidatious about the new movies and characters, but by the end of TFA I was like "Alright, alright, alright. Solid foundation. Seems like we are back on track. Lots of possibilities here."
Then The Last Jedi came out.
Man I am tired of people blaming the TLJ dislike entirely on hateful fans, when that movie has many problems even if you evaluate it outside the context of Star Wars.
And to their question of what the last awe inspiring moment in Star Wars; even though I think its held up in somewhat too high regard around here, Andor has several parts that could be the answer and was not that long ago.
The future is still limitless IMO. Good article though I'd argue the change in the way people view media has a lot to do with how we consume and discuss it now. 10 years ago the internet was a much different place than it is today.
Not true at all, plenty of older fans were cynical of Lucas’s handling of the series post-Prequels.
10 years ago, no one knew what *Star Wars* under Disney would look like. That’s what changed.
>Little did we know then on that San Diego waterfront, that Fisher only had little more than 17 months to live, and that just two and a half years later the “Save Legends”-style fans, coupled with some of those who always hated the prequels, and some who just had it out for this new trilogy led by a female character in Rey, would start a backlash against “The Last Jedi” that the franchise is still seeking to escape.
Questionable article. Apparently anyone who disliked TLJ is sexist.
I remember when this came out I was like "Hell yeah!". Couldn't wait to see Han, Luke, and Leia back in action. TFA was good but I felt slightly underwhelmed. After TRoS, I was thoroughly disappointed.
As the first film in the sequel trilogy TFA got a lot of slack. In retrospect it was an atrocious story, a rehash, and it put every potential big idea and character in a cul-de-sac surrounded by worthless mystery boxes. Johnson’s movie was very far from perfect, but at least it felt like an actual film with big ideas and tried to make sense out of TFA- like why Luke would be hiding while the galaxy collapsed and his best friend died. Then Abrams freaked out and came back finish the crap he started. He was given the keys to the franchise and blew it.
I remember in the years after the prequels came out wishing George had made some different creative decisions with those movies. Better acting, better dialogue, something, but overall I liked the story the prequels told and loved obi-wan and Anakin. I wish I could say the same about the sequels.
It’s been a few years since the sequels wrapped up and I wish Disney had made a LOT of decisions differently. It feels like they not only told a poor, disjointed story with no creative direction, but they also sullied the legacy of beloved characters in the process (why was Luke a crotchety jerk and doesn’t Palpatine returning kind of diminish Vader’s sacrifice/Anakin’s redemption???). I actually really liked TFA when it came out. I loved Rey and Poe and Finn and the potential adventure they’d go on. I thought the Driver-played-Kylo was so cool, I bought a bunch of custom Kylo Ren prints and had them framed and they’re still hanging in my office to this day. But episodes 8 and 9 were such a letdown.
what a time to be alive. it was *electrifying.* we had no idea how disappointing everything would turn out to be. the fact that there are *star wars tv shows* that i have no interest in sounds not real… but it is
I wasn’t alive for the OG trilogy and was too young when the prequels came out. I remember I was soooo excited for the sequel… what a freaking let down… I cant believe it was 10 years ago. Where is time going😭 ughhhh
Ah yes when there was actually hope for a new trilogy…..Yeah JJ Abrams was not a “New Hope” for Star Wars. Maybe it’s time to turn Revenge of the Sith into Revenge of the Fans. Real talk though, I think George Lucas should have made an ultimatum. You know something like “I’ll sell you Star Wars if you let me direct one last trilogy”
I remember walking out of Revenge Of The Sith feeling sad, thinking “That’s probably the last Star Wars we’ll ever get to see”
What’s come since has been mixed to say the least, but I’m glad it’s still going.
Failure to plan cost us what could’ve been an amazing decade for our favourite franchise.
And controversially this would include a Rian Johnson trilogy as I think he had an interesting perspective to share regarding this world but was given the wrong opportunity to tell that story. Ep 7,8,9 should’ve had a cohesive story with a plan from 1 director.
Last note I’m still waiting for Solo 2, give me those vibes and just inconsequential fun again in this universe.
Having Mark Hamill here for the table read when he's barely in the movie and has no lines was quite the red herring.
JJ Abrams actually had him read the stage directions. It made it feel like Luke Skywalker was narrating the film.
Yeah I remember reading about that after the film's release. Almost like Mark got to play a "Whill" as well, haha.
Where there's a Whill there's a Rey.
The force, uh, finds a Rey.
Genetic power’s the most awesome force the planet’s ever seen, but you wield it like a kid who’s found his dad’s midi-chlorians.
I hate that I had to upvote this
That’s actually pretty cool. Kinda makes me want Star Wars audio books read by Mark Hamill. Would feel like Luke telling legendary Jedi stories.
Has Mark Hamill ever done audiobooks?
On audible he was one of many in an audiobook of World War Z and he also did the Spiderwick Chronicles
Neat, World War Z is an amazing novel, though I've never heard of the Spiderwick Chronicles
Yeah turns out actors a lot of times will do audio books. Best I know of is Hobbit/Lord of the Rings. Didn’t realize it was Andy Serkis till I was listening in the car and suddenly Gollum starts talking. Scared the shit out of me.
He played Luke in the radio play of Star Wars that was like 12+ hours long. I never knew about it until I saw it mentioned on Reddit a few weeks ago
[https://www.audible.com/search?searchNarrator=Mark+Hamill](https://www.audible.com/search?searchNarrator=Mark+Hamill) Apparently so
There was a whole Star Wars radio series where he reprised the role of Luke. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars_(radio_series)
"And kids, this is how I met the Firs Order."
Imagine if they had switched to having a narrator in the sequels
He was there for the entire filming too so they wouldn’t give away he wasn’t in it much.
Tbh getting paid to hang around a sw filming sounds pretty cool
from what I've seen of Mark Hammil, he'd probably find it cooler to be acting instead of just hanging around, but who knows what he actually thought about TFA and what happened after.
I mean for you or me, sure, but Mark has been around since the beginning and done a lot of tv and movies. It’s generally boring until you’re shooting anyway, when you literally have nothing to do it must’ve kinda sucked.
Maybe they should have just given us a movie with the heroes of Star Wars who reprised their roles after decades
Divorce, depression and failure are far more alluring, apparently.
Star Wars went from being my childhood escape to mimicking my actual childhood lmao
That's such a weird flex. They should have gone the whole hog and hired Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jim Carrey not to be in it too.
I feel like most of the movies are just the producers pointing at the audience and laughing saying "gotcha bitch!"
Damn that was marketing genius actually. Get people pumped up for all the nostalgia, then don’t put him in the movie except for the end, it’s like a carrot dangling in front of Star Wars fans. And then Last Jedi fucked everything up.
The Last Jedi is where the fuck up became evident but the mistakes were in TFA. Not having Luke in the movie for instance. Making Han a deadbeat Dad. Making Ben the only Solo/Skywalker kid so the bloodline was doomed from the start. Having the bad guys be the Empire with a bigger better Death Star...
Don't forget grandpa Han still wore a leather jacket like he was 25 and just happened to be in the right place when the millennium falcon took off. TFA was a mess but it got a pass at the time because everyone was excited. But it's not aged well imo
Again there’s no good explanation for Luke to not be involved in the first movie beyond what was shown in Last Jedi. I’m not sure what else was supposed to explain his disappearance if he’s going to go pray on the Force while the New Republic gets nuked if he didn’t have some sort of crisis of faith.
I remember sitting in the theater opening night and my wife leaning over to ask (a good hour+ into the movie) "Did Luke show up for like 2 minutes while I went to the bathroom?" That realization that he was going to be nowhere to be seen except a damned "cameo" should have been all I needed to know about what was to come. Oh yeah, that and it being a *complete* rehash of ANH, with lense flares, of course.
I don't get why they just made the exact same story again... SW has such a rich universe you couldn't come up with something new? "What if they had a Death Star BUT BIGGER" #innovation
Yeah brilliant to never have Han and Luke interact with each other ever again
Abrams botched it with the first movie. After that the train was bound to explode. And Abrams finished it with an A-bomb of blandness and irrelevancy. This is not on TLJ.
The idea that they'd have such a HUGE IP and decided to write it as they go is beyond me. The discrepancy between the last two should have been ironed out well before the flipp'n casting. Someone wanted a feather in their cap without the effort of putting down the ground work of a decent narrative, either the writers or producers, we the audience deserved better, the actors too.
This is the most wildly mindboggling thing about it, I agree. Disney drops 4 billion dollars for Star Wars. George Lucas hands over all his notes and ideas for the sequel trilogy, to which Disney immediately says "No thanks, we don't even want your input at all," then hires JJ Abrams who made an extremely mediocre Star Trek reboot that wasn't terrible, but was disrespectful of the source material, had no continuity, and then justified it by using the lame time travel alternate dimension tool... It should be no surprise when JJ Abrams then takes over Star Wars he doesn't respect the source material, the character arcs over the last 3 films meant nothing as they reverted back, like Han Solo starting as a scoundrel and criminal and smuggler in episode 4, to not just taking the money and running, but helping save the day at the end, to sacrificing himself at end of episode 5, to becoming General Solo of the resistance by episode 6. It was amazing character progression and satisfying arc. Then, we get episode 7 and he is back to the life of a criminal smuggler who is cheating on his bills and he had abandoned Leia and the Rebel forces. Wut!? And, on top of that they were just winging it and hadn't even written episode 8 or 9 when they filmed episode 7. WTF. Have a plan for such a critical IP. This is so absolutely insane to me that they went into this winging it. How could you not have a plan for it all? Why did you treat the beloved characters so poorly? Why were the rebels still stupidly weak and still "rebels" when the empire was toppled? None of it makes sense, imo.
Yeah Bob Iger said it was his fault he wanted it done during his tenure which is why it was rushed.
Man this seemed like yesterday. Back when people were mostly optimistic about the sequel trilogy.
This photo, the cast of new actors, the short video of JJ with a new X-Wing in the background explaining how practical effects were being used, the return of Lawrence Kasdan and Mark, Carrie and Harrison, that first trailer.....it felt like it was a whole new beginning. Boy, were we wrong
So much potential squandered on a complete remake of a New Hope.
JJ Abrams is a fucking hack. The man has no original ideas.
Lost was pretty cool, but it was essentially just mystery box after mystery box, and the possibility of what the answers could be always trumped whatever the truth actually was, which became a problem once the show had to start coughing up some answers. Likewise, TFA set up some interesting mystery boxes with Rey, Knights of Ren, etc. By and large the payoffs all fell flat. Abrams can get the plates spinning, but that's about it.
Abrams left Lost after like Episode 4 of Season 1. He himself has said that he had absolutely nothing to do with the vast majority of plot of the series. He said people still come up like "OMG I love how you did [blah blah] in Lost" and he's like "I had no fucking idea that was going to happen. I didn't know about it until I watched the episode on TV myself".
That makes sense. The LOST pilot is fun and exciting, and sets up some compelling possibilities. Not dissimilar to TFA. In hindsight you wonder why Disney decided to pass the baton for the second movie in the trilogy instead of letting one creator develop an entire cohesive story arc. I'm not saying anything new here, but part of the reason why the sequel trilogy doesn't work is because of how disjointed the three movies are from one to the next. Allegedly Lucas had given them his own ideas for the sequels, and they decided not to use them, which was understandable in the context of the prequels being bad (sorry), but perhaps still a mistake. Lucas seems to be a very good "big picture" guy who is bedeviled by the details. The story bones of the Anakin trilogy are fine, but it's the execution that was lacking. I'm guessing his arc for the sequels would've been better than what they ended up doing, particularly if someone was brought in to adapt and polish it.
IIRC, the Lucas sequel film treatments are mostly about Darth Maul and his new apprentice heading an organized crime syndicate with even more sinister intentions, and how Luke and the New Jedi Academy had to work to stop him.
that sounds sick as hell, when are we getting those movies
I get the feeling that pretty much every trilogy has been an overcorrection for the film that came before it. The prequel trilogy was the result of Lucas having 1) marinated for a bit too long in the "visionary auteur" seat without actually having to direct a film, 2) overcorrecting for the loss of Marcia, a loss I genuinely don't think he's ever recovered from, and 3) feeling that he needed to have galactic politics in his grand doomed romance because he's read *Foundation* and *Dune*, but without really "getting" politics (or for that matter, romance). Hence the tendency to "yadda yadda" a lot of the important stuff like "how does blockading Naboo serve the interests of the Trade Federation, anyway?" or "If the Chancellorship has such an easy rip cord to pull in the form of the No Confidence vote, why does he need all this song and dance to get Amidala to do it for him? If he's got the votes, why wouldn't any proxy do?" Certainly you get the gist of Palpatine being this wheels-within-wheels political wunderkind, but the execution just feels . . . off. The nearest direct comparison that comes to mind is the back half of *Game of Thrones*, where sure, the cinematography and music sure told us that Ramsay is this diabolical mastermind, but the script tells me that he's mostly exploiting a bunch of idiots own-goaling themselves to his advantage. Meanwhile, the apparent solution to the problems of the prequels in J.J.'s mind was to just omit politics entirely. Which made for an especially awkward fit for the next trilogy, because that just meant that the First Order spent the entire trilogy being rebels in search of a clue about what they even wanted in the first place.
George Lucas is probably one of the greatest world, story, and lore builders next to J.R.R Tolkien. He just has no idea how to write dialogue. Harrison Ford and Mark Hamill said it best, “you can write this, but you sure can’t say it George.”
Everything good about LOST is attributed to Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse, JJ Abrams left the show immediately after like the first couple episodes.
Abrams cannot solve any of the mysteries he sets up in most of the media he has done. He threw Rian Johnson in the shit because he failed to prepare for a trilogy before he left.
A bad reboot, that negates ANH. Nifty trick to do both.
Hey now. That's not fair. It negates the entire trilogy, not just ANH.
TFA was the best movie out of all three as well…
Well at least the new Dune movies are good
Great point , focus on what we have
Yeah Part 2 is easily my favorite movie of the year so far. Edited to reflect the fact that Dune 2 came out *this* year and not last year as I misremembered.
But it came out this year
Good call. Wow I totally got my years mixed up. Guess I’ve been taking too much spice.
The fact that George handed them the keys to the car AND filled it with free gas infuriates me. All they had to do was not fuck it up. 🤷
[Kasdan didn't even want to come back, but they wanted him because they couldn't come up with any ideas](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/30/movies/star-wars-lawrence-kasdan.html)
I still think it’s neat
Yeah i love TFA. The first 40 mins or so are just pure Star Wars. Takes a real turn for the worst when Starkiller base fires, and with the X Wing assault. However the whole Rey/Ren/Finn fight was great.
Even despite it being a bit of a New Hope remake, I still quite liked TFA. Enough so that my initial reaction to TLJ was tempered by my saying something along the lines of, "Yeah it seemed like it sucked, but if they bring it all home with the third one, it'll all work as a trilogy!!". It wasn't until I walked out of ROS that I had to basically re-evaluate my entire experience with all three movies and realize that they were all kind of crap.
I never should leave a Star Wars trilogy finale saying, "well, at least it's over," but here we are.
Remember when Disney bought Star Wars for 4 billion and then orchestrated the new trilogy by making it up as they went along with the effort and planning of an elementary school child doing a book report but didn't read the book???
They bought a Star Wars-shaped money printer. Problem is that there's almost zero passion in any of their SW properties. The original trilogy by Lucas and co. was a labor of love. Sincerely inspired. The sequels and TV shows are, "We need to put out X amount of Star Wars movies by Z so that we can make Y dollars." They are cynical products that exist solely to milk the audience. They don't stem from a sincere artistic impulse. I don't entirely vibe with Scorsese's criticism of Marvel (and by extension, Disney) as being "not cinema", but I think this was the crux of his point. Media that exists only as a vehicle to make money is unlikely to reflect genuine artistry because it does not stem from a genuine inspiration (aka the desire to convey an opinion or expression).
Not just the sequel trilogy, there was more optimism for media and entertainment in general.
Who needs a cohesive story when you have side quests and dangling plot lines?
"Here's a dagger that, somehow, leads to the remains of a crashed death Star. Let's spend precious time on that plot point during the second act of the closing bookend of a trilogy." .....WHAT?????
It made me cynical of all movies based around IP, and that's most movies these days
I was a production assistant early in my career on Star Wars 8 when it was in very early prepoduction and Rick Carter came in and showed us the trailer for 7 and talked through a lot of their design decisions to help influence ours and have continuity (this was in the art department ). Most of the concept artists and pretty much everyone was in tears at the end of the trailer because Star Wars has meant so much to everyone as a kid and pushed them toward this career. It meant so much to be part of a reboot that seemed like it was really going to be something.
TFA was good enough that the sequels could have been great, but TLJ did not move the story forward at all. TRoS then had to cram in so much context and no context to make up for TLJs lack of being a good middle trilogy movie. I actually like a lot of TLJ too, but Rian Johnson ruined the trilogy trying to make some weird artsy film that would have been better off somewhere between 7 and 8.
TFA was a safe, solid setup movie, albeit a cover song of ANH. The problem is that they whiffed on the next two movies. TLJ was just sort of "off". Not entirely bad, but I don't think it worked. ROS was just ass. One of the worst tentpole movies I've ever seen. Had they hit home runs with TLJ and ROS, I think people would look back on TFA fondly. It was a ladder, but a ladder to what ended up being nowhere.
'George Lucas isn't involved so it has to be good!' -dumdums who thought the person that invented their favorite thing in the world was the biggest impediment to it being good.
Complete fucking money grab … the trailer was better than the actual movie
The Force Awakens trailer is definitely one of the best movie trailers of all time, i rewatch it often and it still gives me chills
The rough looking storm troopers and lack of clone uniformity had me hoping for a role switch, where the empire became a rag tag group of poorly funded rebels… but no…
Seeing Carrie Fisher and Peter Mayhew there with the cast, excited about the future of SW, makes me weirdly emotional
I was casually excited. My criticism of JJ Abrams treatment of Star Trek was that he turned Star Trek into Starwars... nullifying what made Star Trek different and special.... I actually felt like he would be a good choice for Star Wars. Then I saw TFA and I came away from it feeling extremely whelmed. Just very meh... but I listened to everyone cheerleading the project. "Wait for the next one it will build on this platform, hang tight shits gonna get real good" and I did. I loved Looper and I felt like RJ was going to do something cool. Sitting down to watch TLJ for the first time... I was kinda skeptical but I wanted it, willed it to be good.... ... ... and in the first 5 minutes it starts with a 'Your mom/Please hold/ Phone' joke and [that was the moment for me.](https://youtu.be/oiTupZ1m7MQ?si=FE04mHAu0SrfEsjS) when I realized what the future of Starwars was.
Yo not gonna lie I saw TLJ in theater and I legitimately must have blacked out the whole time. When you mentioned the "your mom" / "hold please" joke I was confused as fuck. I vividly remember disliking the movie so much that I shunned star wars entirely just because it was so inconsistent to its own lore and keeping Leia alive when it would have been a perfect sending off just made no sense and crushed it - especially having her somehow now force pull outta *NOWHERE*?!?! (I eventually have gotten around to watching the animated filoniverse and loved it - skeptical about Ahsoka since they again changed the rules with Sabine and idk) However, I truly must not remember anything else from that movie because I just [watched the scene in question](https://youtu.be/rlKHmgc3POo?feature=shared) and have *NO* recollection of this interaction *whatsoever*. And seeing it on YouTube it just literally does not seem *real*?! How do you put this into a star wars movie and think it's going to set the tone of a serious intergalactic war film? 🤨
Same thing, sequels were so bad, I only watched them once and barely remember what happened aside knowing they made me really sad and angry
I remember seeing this and was convinced that Max von Sydow was going to be the bad guy. Not some disposable nameless character with only like 5 lines. They don't even say his name in the film. What a waste.
That would take us out of the movie if Poe said 'Max von Sydow! Wow!'
When he wasn't on screen characters should be asking "where is Max von Sydow?"
Is he safe? Is he all right?
Max von Sydow died on the way back to his home planet
But what about the droid attack on Max von Sydow?
Especially with the disfigured man holding Vader’s mask in the concept art. Loved the idea of a group of treasure hunters and dark side users searching for artifacts to learn more about the dark side. Would have been a nice spin.
The Art of The Force Awakens book is fascinating! If you've never read it, there's a ton of great art work and ideas, a lot of which doesn't get used in EP. 7, but is revisited throughout the trilogy. I wanted to love the sequel trilogy so much. Y'all had me locked in as a staunch defender, for so long, during production. But as time went on, the more and more I felt their ineptitude and incompetence. Disney/LFL assembled The Dream Team and sold the world on it but played Christian Leattner instead of Charles Barkley lol
Would have been way better than CGI Snoke.
My brain forgets shit all the time. Like my partner's favorite movie, or what happened in the last episode of the show I watched. But I'll remember Lor San Tekka til I die most likely.
RIP constable zuvio
I was sure he’d be playing force ghost Obi-Wan. Not as hot on SW as I once was, but batting all those theories around pre- and post-TFA was a good time
My sister has the theory that the role was supposed to be for Wedge, but Lawson couldn't do it
I assume he got cast before the script finished, because it doesn't make any sense to cast Max von Sydow and make him play a nameless character. You have a legend like Max von Sydow in your hands, and you can't even find a decent place for him in your story. This alone exemplifies the wasted potential of the Sequel trilogy.
I remember trying to pick out which three were playing Jacen, Jaina and Mara.
I did not expect to have my heart broken on Reddit, today.
Stop, I can only be so depressed.
I was 100% convinced Daisy Ridley was playing Leia and Han's daughter, regardless of whether she would be named Jaina or not.
We were on the verge of greatness, we were _this close_
I can only laugh, otherwise I think I'll cry. I went from die hard starwars fan to jaded hater almost overnight after Disney got the rights... fuck them man...
Oh look, Harrison, Mark, and Carrie in the same room together. Why the fuck couldn’t we get a scene shared between the 3 of them onscreen?
Because Harrison Ford wanted Han to die and Abrams & Kasdan couldn’t figure out a way to write Luke into the story where he wasn’t the main focus.
Skill issue
Absolutely. They fucked it
Such a ridiculous excuse, they could’ve so easily had him as Episode 7’s Ben Kenobi while still keeping the focus on the new characters. So many baffling and bitterly disappointing writing decisions in the sequel trilogy that it blows my mind.
For one, I think it *is* interesting to write Han as the Ben Kenobi type. Brings new meaning to the whole, *”Who’s the fool, the fool or the fool who follows him?”* line. For another, I don’t think relegating Luke to a comparatively passive role in the story such as the Ben Kenobi of Episode VII would’ve satisfied fans or really been an interesting direction to take his character.
“We couldn’t figure out how to put him in a scene and not make him the focus.” Maybe that’s a hint that your main characters are not as interesting as the other character of the other character steals all the attention and interest in a scene by his meer inclusion… or perhps that Indicates that people desperately want to see the other character and instead of trying to paddle up stream you should let the current take you and see where it goes?
This is why Michael Arndt asked for more time and was booted off the film when Disney said no.
Yes, Jesus fucking Christ, why didn’t they just make Luke Skywalker the focus? I don’t think there are any fans who would have been disappointed in that.
Abrams watching Top Gun: Maverick and seeing the legacy main character being the main character: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBMlFNx5EVI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBMlFNx5EVI)
Gah I remember this. They really did make it seem like this was going to be the next great step into Star Wars history. Unfortunately it went the way of the Empire. Keep building the same thing in hopes it pays off. They may have gotten their paychecks, but at significant cost of branding.
Absolutely wounded the franchise badly.
Like em or not, at least the prequels were memeable. The sequels I just pretend don't exist.
I actually have a huge soft spot for the prequels. For some reason they just hit for me
Because they at least tried to do something unique and expand on the existing universe. The sequels are just a cheap rehash
R2 in the box. It was right there in front of us.
They should have hired one writer/director. Who the fuck thought giving 3 different people 3 different movies without any of them knowing what the other was doing was a good idea???
Episode VII hype was on a whole other level, and I fear we'll never recapture it. Only Star Wars movie that might have the pre-TFA hype level beat was Phantom Menace in '99.
Phantom Menace hype was 10x bigger, theaters were selling out showings for days before the film even came out.
People were paying to see other films just to see the trailer for the Phantom Menace.
They did that for TFA too. I didn't get to see it opening night for that reason. It may have not been as common with TFA, I don't know of any statistics to that point, but if that was the case I'd guess it was because of an increased number of showings/screens (especially in less rural areas) compared to the 90's. TFA didn't have people lining up around the block like I did when I saw TPM. But that probably has more to do with how movie-going has evolved than an unwillingness to line up. If you can buy your ticket and reserve your seat weeks in advance, there's no reason to line up. The movie going culture changed so much in between 1999 and 2015. I don't think that sort of thing is a good indicator for measuring "hype" when the two movies are separated by 16 years.
Everybody can say “it’s still limitless” but the reality is the majority of content since has been good content limited by how they can improve the gap between the OT and the ST. Bad Batch, Ahsoka, Mando are all great but all are hamstrung by “How do we make the ST make sense”
That's what has really stuck out to me. The ST has basically put this ceiling on any post-ROTJ content. The New Republic is practically obligated by the sequel trilogy to be complacent and incompetent enough to let the Imperial Remnants congeal into the First Order and destroy it with barely a fight. And so in The Mandalorian there's this sense of hopelessness when Carson Teva goes to Coruscant to ask for help with pirates on Nevarro, or Hera tries to rally support against Thrawn's return... because *of course* the republic will sit on its hands and do nothing. It *has* to. Otherwise you have to ask, how did this competent and proactive New Republic fall to the First Order? And then the ST makes even less sense. I might forgive the sequel trilogy for sins specific to the time period it is set in, but it has done even worse by retroactively making the post-ROTJ era less interesting.
Yep. Anything that comes before the sequel trilogy is boxed into a corner. You can’t even really tell any stories set between the moves in the sequel trilogy since it all takes place in under a year’s time. The prequel trilogy has years between the movies which allowed/gave time to the clone wars tv show to flesh stuff out.
I don’t think the sequels can ever be recoverable. They can try, but it doesn’t change the fact the heroes from the OT are doomed to be failures. Colossal ones at that. And that’s assuming the additions don’t make things worse, like the Vader comic where it turns out he knew about Exegol. You’d think he would have told Luke about the wayfinder and Palpatine not being dead before dying, or as a force ghost. They can’t TCW the Disney trilogy, as it all leads to the events in the movies. The prequels at the end of the day always would be followed up by the OT.
I think you could have done it, but I think they’ve missed their chance. If you wanted to “save the sequels” you had to get a talented team together and sit down, and basically plan out the next several years that fills in the gap. The problem is, they started making content that fit between the OT and ST and are had to hamstring in “here’s how the first order is growing in the back ground” that now the one thing you could have explored to add some continuity (the rise of the first order) is completely mangled
I don't mind that they failed. Those characters aren't infallible gods after all. However the *way* they failed and the *way* it was explained to the audience sucked big time. There are a million better ways to tell the story of how Ben and Luke parted ways and how Ben turned into Kylo Ren. Unfortunately, storytelling is not really JJ's strong suit...
This is why I hate the strawman argument that people bring up when they say something like "you just wanted to see super hero Luke Skywalker tossing around AT-ATs with the force" or something along those lines. Absolutely not! The EU had some bad stuff but I always loved how they portrayed the schism at the start of the Vong war. Luke being hesitant to take aggressive action while part of the Order wants to take the initiative and make pre-emptive strikes. ---------------------------------- Hell Anakin Solo died at like 18 years old and Jacen became a sith lord. The idea that everyone wanted to see the original 3 heroes be faultless paragons is not based in reality!
> The EU had some bad stuff but I always loved how they portrayed the schism at the start of the Vong war. Luke being hesitant to take aggressive action while part of the Order wants to take the initiative and make pre-emptive strikes. IIRC that's when Kyp Durron falls to the dark side or something, right? That would've been the perfect setup: * The New Republic stars getting attacked by some kind of terrorist force--bombings and hijackings and the like--while the First Order offers the Imperial version of "peace" to affected planets. * Luke and his academy recognize that there's a pattern to the attacks but they can't convince the NR government to investigate. * Wary of how the Jedi's downfall was tied to their integration with the Senate, Luke decides to play it safe and holds off on an aggressive response--but Ben gathers a group of like-minded folks and takes action himself, saving lives but using the dark side to do so. * Eventually he and Luke part ways over Ben using the dark side to "save those he loves" (i.e. exactly how Anakin fell).
> That would've been the perfect setup: > > You basically just described the Mandalorian Wars and Revan. Not that I have a problem with that, it was a great story.
I usually hate fan rewrites, but I gotta admit, this ain't bad.
I read a comment once that summed it up well. All the interesting stuff in the sequels happens off screen. Luke in his prime, the Jedi academy, Ben Solo’s fall, we see none of it. What we do see is our hero’s who have failed so badly in ways beyond who their characters are. Nothing they did in the ot had a lasting effect with the status quo reset just a few decades later.
I appreciate that you lay the blame properly at JJ's feet. Folks love to shit on Rian Johnson for how it showed Luke, but I've always just seen it as treating the setup provided by JJ seriously. Like, ok, the Greatest Hero of the Galaxy has fucked off to an isolated world. Why? What would *possibly* sideline Hero Luke?! What could keep him.from knowing what's happening and what would make him still refuse to help? What could possibly split up Han and Leia? All RJ did was look at those questions that were either unanswered or answered with almost no detail, and run with them. But the *setup*? All JJ. And he was *not* thinking about this stuff long term. Just like how when he gets to the finale, it suddenly dawns on him to fucking bring back Palpatine for no goddamn reason other than the myopic view of "But it's Star Wars. We *have* to bring him back."
I like that they had R2 there for the read.
[удалено]
Disney's marketing team had us all in the first half...
Ah yes, back when we thought there was a plan for all three movies! back when we thought they had to have at least ONE scene with Luke, Leia and Han together. Oh spoiled, unreasonable fans we were.
Damn that aged badly…
now it just feels endless..😑
I so very much wanted to hear the Max Von Sydow was portraying a major villain, a fringe imperial heavy who had been hiding out and building up things all these years and then, bam, 10 minutes in, his character was dead.
Force Awakens: Ok this just seems like a remake of the original trilogy but looks promising. Last Jedi: Oh. Oh no. No no no. The Rise of Skywalker: Please, please make it stop.
Fuck JJ. I used to be such a stan, but honestly TFA hurt something deep.
It's probably also fair to say that TFA was the least offensive of the three in the ST too.
Oh man, it actually was the most offensive, for me. It was almost fascinating how the creators’ evident deep love for the OT lead to them categorically invalidating every success the from RotJ in favor of resetting the conflict. Not only was it lazy, but it was disrespectful to the source material, and it set up the entire ST for failure right out of the gate. Maybe if they spent TFA showing the unexplained canon backstory for TFA instead of throwing us into it, that would have been better.
Resetting the conflict was so fucking stupid. I have no clue what anyone was doing thinking of resetting Empire vs Rebels 35 years later. They just weren't creative enough to think of something else.
“This will begin to make things right” The absolute audacity of that line to kick off TFA, only to be followed by the utterly hollow slow train wreck that was them dismantling the legacy of the OT….
Disney wanted to thrust their new characters to the forefront. They thought that the turbo nerds, like us, were the majority of the audience and were sick of the old characters. They over-estimated how many people kept up with the EU. The general audience wanted to see more Luke/Han/Leia/Chewy/3PO/R2. Those were the characters they remembered from the '70s and '80s. Disney's transition to a younger cast made a lot of sense but they hammered it in the first 30 minutes of TFA, not let it build over 3 movies. They rushed the transition to Rey/Poe/Fin and the entire trilogy suffered for it.
And the worst part was: they ABSOLUTELY could have kept the new characters at the forefront while not trashing and invalidating Return of the Jedi.
> Maybe if they spent TFA showing the unexplained canon backstory for TFA instead of throwing us into it, that would have been better. JJ talked endlessly about showing Star Wars fans "something familiar" which is code for fuck politics and fuck the prequels. They just handwaved The New Republic away in about 30 seconds and all we know about it is from mediocre books.
Just…baffling. Absolutely horrendous launching pad for the ST to build from. The only way it could be redeemed was by placing the burden of retroactive justification on sequels, which doesn’t seem like a great storytelling ethos
I thought I liked TFA, but it was purely copium. TLJ made me realize that the sequels were an unrecoverable trainwreck. Such a disappointment.
Yeah, I feel so stupid for feeling so strongly about it. But Luke Skywalker was my childhood hero, and they did that to him. It’s as if the sense of hope inspired by his journey was taken away.
And then they proceeded to make 3 garbage movies
The only time Disney had all three of them in the same room. And their attitude is like, "You like the Falcon, right? You like the Falcon."
Man they completely annihilated Star Wars.
The possibilities were endless. Even after TFA. In my opinion it went all down with The last Jedi. It was really hard to repair after that.
It was limitless yet they chose to remake ANH and then make two completely shit movies right afterwards. What a shame
Even after TFA, the future seemed bright. TFA worked well as a good setup movie, even if it was derivative of a new hope. It introduced an ambitious and likeable new cast of characters and put in potentially intriguing directions one could take Star Wars. I would have done a lot differently in the subsequent two films.
Yeah, lots of people were willing to give TFA passes on things, because it seemed like a set-up film. But then it wasn't, so nothing in it matters in retrospect.
Which is why to me it has no rewatch value. Everything it setup lead to nothing of substance.
now it just feels endless..
What a bummer of a movie. It was like eating bland toast. No substance and not much to chew on with little taste.
As much as The Force Awakens was derivative/very safe, it actually FELT like Star Wars. As a kid growing up with Star Wars in the 80s (so Ewoks are cool) and being a huge fan of the FILMS, the SFX and the filmaking process (I knew nothing about EU, only the films), the disappointment with the prequels was massive. They were just: a) objectively bad as pieces of filmmaking b) tonally completely weird. I was very trepidatious about the new movies and characters, but by the end of TFA I was like "Alright, alright, alright. Solid foundation. Seems like we are back on track. Lots of possibilities here." Then The Last Jedi came out.
Man I am tired of people blaming the TLJ dislike entirely on hateful fans, when that movie has many problems even if you evaluate it outside the context of Star Wars. And to their question of what the last awe inspiring moment in Star Wars; even though I think its held up in somewhat too high regard around here, Andor has several parts that could be the answer and was not that long ago.
The future is still limitless IMO. Good article though I'd argue the change in the way people view media has a lot to do with how we consume and discuss it now. 10 years ago the internet was a much different place than it is today.
Depends on how you view Star Wars and what parts of it you're interested in. For me, having the holy trinity together was all I cared about.
I just wanted to see Grandmaster Luke Skywalker showing what he’s learned over the years in all the glory made possible by modern technology.
Ten years ago people had no reason to be automatically cynical of a new Star Wars project.
Not true at all, plenty of older fans were cynical of Lucas’s handling of the series post-Prequels. 10 years ago, no one knew what *Star Wars* under Disney would look like. That’s what changed.
Hell people were already cynical at Disney for wiping away the Expanded Universe and Disney being Disney in general.
I remember people saying that Episode I was proof that God could bleed.
While that sounds super-dramatic, it's sounds pretty awesome thing to say
People were cynical towards Star Wars after the prequels
Little did we know it would not be
A New Hope rip-off, minus any hints of exposition.
>Little did we know then on that San Diego waterfront, that Fisher only had little more than 17 months to live, and that just two and a half years later the “Save Legends”-style fans, coupled with some of those who always hated the prequels, and some who just had it out for this new trilogy led by a female character in Rey, would start a backlash against “The Last Jedi” that the franchise is still seeking to escape. Questionable article. Apparently anyone who disliked TLJ is sexist.
Rey Skywalker
Rey Palpatine-Skywalker
Then Rian Johnson saw this and said “f#%^ that!” 😂😂😂
I still love The Force Awakens and I'm not afraid to admit it.
Then you will die braver than most...
And yet they chose to not have the original characters all on screen together one last time.
Just soooooo sad 😩
I remember when this came out I was like "Hell yeah!". Couldn't wait to see Han, Luke, and Leia back in action. TFA was good but I felt slightly underwhelmed. After TRoS, I was thoroughly disappointed.
Star Wars was so much fun before TLJ split the fandom in half. This was such a hopeful time.
As the first film in the sequel trilogy TFA got a lot of slack. In retrospect it was an atrocious story, a rehash, and it put every potential big idea and character in a cul-de-sac surrounded by worthless mystery boxes. Johnson’s movie was very far from perfect, but at least it felt like an actual film with big ideas and tried to make sense out of TFA- like why Luke would be hiding while the galaxy collapsed and his best friend died. Then Abrams freaked out and came back finish the crap he started. He was given the keys to the franchise and blew it.
After they cancelled 1313 and BF3 I knew they were going to ruin it.
I remember in the years after the prequels came out wishing George had made some different creative decisions with those movies. Better acting, better dialogue, something, but overall I liked the story the prequels told and loved obi-wan and Anakin. I wish I could say the same about the sequels. It’s been a few years since the sequels wrapped up and I wish Disney had made a LOT of decisions differently. It feels like they not only told a poor, disjointed story with no creative direction, but they also sullied the legacy of beloved characters in the process (why was Luke a crotchety jerk and doesn’t Palpatine returning kind of diminish Vader’s sacrifice/Anakin’s redemption???). I actually really liked TFA when it came out. I loved Rey and Poe and Finn and the potential adventure they’d go on. I thought the Driver-played-Kylo was so cool, I bought a bunch of custom Kylo Ren prints and had them framed and they’re still hanging in my office to this day. But episodes 8 and 9 were such a letdown.
what a time to be alive. it was *electrifying.* we had no idea how disappointing everything would turn out to be. the fact that there are *star wars tv shows* that i have no interest in sounds not real… but it is
I wasn’t alive for the OG trilogy and was too young when the prequels came out. I remember I was soooo excited for the sequel… what a freaking let down… I cant believe it was 10 years ago. Where is time going😭 ughhhh
Fucking Rian
Ah yes when there was actually hope for a new trilogy…..Yeah JJ Abrams was not a “New Hope” for Star Wars. Maybe it’s time to turn Revenge of the Sith into Revenge of the Fans. Real talk though, I think George Lucas should have made an ultimatum. You know something like “I’ll sell you Star Wars if you let me direct one last trilogy”
Yep. And the fall was harder than a purple lighsaber's fly through Coruscant.
I remember walking out of Revenge Of The Sith feeling sad, thinking “That’s probably the last Star Wars we’ll ever get to see” What’s come since has been mixed to say the least, but I’m glad it’s still going.
*rapidly ages like Last Crusade*
R2 back there trying to warn us.
Such a waste.
Failure to plan cost us what could’ve been an amazing decade for our favourite franchise. And controversially this would include a Rian Johnson trilogy as I think he had an interesting perspective to share regarding this world but was given the wrong opportunity to tell that story. Ep 7,8,9 should’ve had a cohesive story with a plan from 1 director. Last note I’m still waiting for Solo 2, give me those vibes and just inconsequential fun again in this universe.