Strong episode this week.
Tip of the cap to the decision to abandon the âEzra is super annoying and weâre all asked to pretend he isnâtâ vibe from Rebels and actually have him be a cool character now that heâs fully adult.
That was by a wide margin my favorite episode so far but wow that was short, and theyâre saving the Baylan payoffs for the last one so I hope theyâre good.
Iâll say that I do think an issue with this show that it feels like thereâs no way to get away from is that it doesnât feel like there are meaningful stakes relating to the A-plot. Announcing that weâre building toward a Thrawn movie means that weâre headed for some sort of non-resolution with him in the immediate term, and it does impact the feel of the show for me as I look for stakes to get invested in.
What if it led to the fan service vis a vis Luke as a full Jedi, etc that audiences felt was stolen from them with The Last Jedi?
I always loved TLJ, even more now that Iâm like well itâs actually a profound answer to âwhat would Luke face at the end of his life?â
It was just a disappointing answer for audiences who were asking a different question about a different era of his life.
Ahsoka is a way to bring in those elements and characters without being tied to yet another Skywalker saga. Iâd be giddy if they went that direction with this level of quality.
I, too, love TLJ, and in turn harbor seething contempt for the Star Wars core fans who hated it, because their childlike reaction is the reason that the atrocity known as The Rise of Skywalker turned out the way that it did, which in turn is the reason that weâre on a long-term film hiatus from the franchise in general.
TLJ is a string of nonsensical plot points, punctuated by a few failed attempts at humor and a couple of /r/im14andthisisdeep moments, and Iâll die on that hill.
I get so irritated by people that assume the only reason fans wouldnât jizz all over that movie is because they just wanted to see fan service of Luke slicing things up with his lightsaber, or couldnât handle the deeeeeep themes it explored. Even if this movie were just ârandom sci-fi film #375â and not part of the SW universe, it would be utterly head-scratching.
I also canât help but wonder what could have been if we just hadnât lost Carrie Fisher.
Your irritation should lie primarily with the large number of people who have validated said assumption by making the subversion of Lukeâs character the loudest anti-TLJ talking point. I suppose I should have phrased my post to more specifically aim my shots at just those people, but surely youâre aware that these people exist in large numbers and that these people are indeed the ones who took a wrecking ball to JJ Abramsâs brain right before the making of TROS.
Iâll note that I actually only watched TLJ the one time since it felt like TROS was so aggressively terrible that it was essentially an hours-long demand to decanonize the entire trilogy (something I would not have felt even a little bit prior to its release, I was enjoying the trilogy), and I do think TLJ was devalued accordingly as a rewatchable SW movie. But obviously thatâs not the fault of anyone involved with TLJ.
Thereâs no question that this was just a rotten turn of events for TROS and did almost surely make the movie worse than it would have been, through no fault of anyoneâs. That said, I cannot imagine that this actually made enough of a difference that it could have actually been a good movie if she were around.
Familiar at all with Colin Trevorowâs script?
This was the vision for how to complete the trilogy and what I think is the appropriate starting point for what the movie would have looked like.
But Carrie passed and the movie had to be redesigned from the ground up. After a stunning vote of confidence in Colin Trevorow from Safety Not Guaranteed and Jurassic World, he didnât survive the critical backlash to The Book of Henry. JJ Abrams was brought back in to save the sinking ship.
Itâs all good, thanks for clarifying that. No doubt a lot of TLJ-hating fans are of the type youâre describing, but I donât really think theyâre the majority.
My post was just meant to represent those of us that hate the movie because we think itâs a muddled mess, thatâs also, for all the praise it gets for âtrying new thingsâ, is just as derivitive as TFA always gets knocked for (hmmâŚthe Resistance gets driven from its base and flees across the galaxyâŚan old master is reluctant to train a young hopeful but eventually relentsâŚthe junior bad guy betrays the big bad and murders him in his own throne roomâŚso original!!).
Fair points.
âI just think itâs a bad movieâ is a perfectly valid critique 
Yeah, totally fair game to have just not enjoyed it, and in no way would I contend that subversion for subversionâs sake is inherently a good thing; thatâs all situation-specific. I just had a great time with the movie and then found that the loud complaints were largely channeled in one direction that I found to be absurd. Which, by itself, would not be the end of the world. But then TROS happened and acted as the ultimate example of how market-testing can go very, very wrong, which in turn causes me to resent the market.
But regarding TLJ, we obviously just digested it differently since, e.g., you refer to failed attempts at humor whereas the humor absolutely worked for me. Your view doesnât seem unreasonable to me even though we disagree.
100% agree that the course-correction attempt was part of what made TROS a dumpster fire. But Iâll argue that at least half the blame goes to the general strategy of:
âHaving a dude drop a movie with all sorts of mystery boxes and open plot threads and then say âwelp, do whatever you want with that, we didnât plan for what happens nextâ
âThe next dude basically making the movie he wanted to make with little to no regard for the previous one, relegating major characters to side plots because he had no idea what to do with them, etcâŚand then btw passing it along again with no plan on how to conclude it.
I feel like TROS had like a 10% chance of not being dysfunctional garbage after all this.
Sure, I agree with some of that. The lack of a focused vision from the top seems particularly unforgivable in light of the tight timeline they were pushing these through on. Employing different directors can be fine, even good, but having different directors with creative visions that are not only not in sync, but are seemingly actively hostile toward each other? WTF. So, while Abrams has to foot a bunch of blame, I agree that this thing was mismanaged terribly at levels above him and left him in a position to fail.
Hot take, one canât truly hate TROS unless one hates TFA too, the ultimate sin of TFA was doing an almost beat by beat retelling of A New Hope, almost mocking the original at times, and punting on the singular opportunity to take Star Wars into new and interesting directions, and thus making the conclusion as inevitability dull as the beginning. But the majority of TROS haters are TFA enjoyers, but I see little difference between them.
TLJ was by far the best of the sequels, well paced, but also something I didnât like a lot. Space Leia, Poe Yawneron, the entirely pointless casino side quest; I could have tolerated the Luke subversion (although to be clear I didnât like it), but they also nopeâd out on giving any backstory to Snoke. I feel like the subversive turn would have been interesting to watch if Ryan Johnson had the full trilogy, because he could hit his themes in a much more satisfying way than just ignoring things from the previous movie.
For sure. TFA was well received by many (myself included, tbh) because even despite the ridiculous premise of going back to a ragtag group of good guys fighting some evil dudes with a giant spherical weapon, it did introduce some promising, engaging characters, was fairly exciting, and got most people interested to see what happened next.
Retroactively, since there was zero payoff to anything it promised, it truly becomes a dismal movie. Not to mention, I feel like there was a huge drop in perceived quality upon rewatch for me, even just seeing it a 2nd time before TLJ came out. Iâll admit I got drawn in originally by some of the key-jangling and once I was able to pay more attention to the plot and dialogueâŚoof.
Your criticisms of TFA are mostly on point and I donât think thereâs much going on in that movie, but it was watchable as a one-off in a way that TROS was not, and thus I just canât get to âhateâ for it.
I say âmostlyâ because I donât agree with
I canât agree that it made the badness of the end that inevitable when I concluded TLJ without having that feeling at all. TFA was extremely generic, but to me was mostly innocuous and laid some very basic building blocks that could have theoretically gone somewhere good even though ultimately they didnât.
I guess also, for all of my invective for it, I donât really view most of TROS as being âdull.â I thought it was something much more aggressively bad than that description suggests. It was much less that I was bored than that I spent the whole movie doing the Jackie Chan head explosion meme.
I guess one of the advantages to already being numb to the whole thing after TLJ and resigned to the franchise being fucked, is that I was able to watch TROS and just laugh at it. I mean you canât actually convince me itâs not a comedy.
âHey look, itâs the intact wreckage of DS II (you know, the one that completely, visibly vaporized three movies ago)! Let me hold up this ancient sith dagger which exactly lines up with the terrain on this ocean moon with all sorts of erosion, and points me to the place I need to go. Fetch me a boat, as my experience as a scavenger on a desert planet has not only taught me to fix Corellian starships and speak Wookiee, but also has made me an accomplished sailor.â