I don’t know about “destroys,” but it certainly doesn’t do it any favors. I’ll say it might have been nice if they hadn’t destroyed the New Republic, and had instead maybe introduced some new characters with a long history of service to the same, who could then form the basis for stories between the NT and the OT or whose stories could have been continued within the (still-existing) New Republic, and taken advantage of the world-building (that should have happened but didn’t) in the NT.
ETA: And I wouldn’t mind a standalone film about how Lando took over Cloud City.
I seriously don’t know what a writer is to do with this. They can either go back in time and write more stories set during the OT or the intervening 30 years before TFA or they can create more origin stories like Solo. Pretty limiting really, and considering Solo wasn’t exactly a hit…
I thought “leaving the Skywalker world behind” was the entire point of the sequel trilogy? Give the original cast their send-off and build a “new” Star Wars around a completely new set of characters unencumbered by the past. I mean, most of the main characters have been killed off, Luke said pretty explicitly that the Jedi Order needed to stay gone, they destroyed practically everything left from Eps. I-VI. I don’t see why they have to “ret-con” them away when the films themselves provide a pretty clean break to go in another direction.
I honestly thought you were going to say “they can go back in time, y’know, like, for real. We’re doing a time-travel story, is what I’m saying: retcons; but, well, the other kind of retcons.”
I dunno… The Mandalorian had all new characters, no Jedi, no Rebel Alliance and no Empire and it is the best Star Wars property since Disney took over. And it is definitely has the Star Wars look and feel.There are hints and echoes of all of the above - Baby Yoda (excuse me, The Child) has force powers, Cara is a former Rebel trooper and and the first season’s big bad, Moff Gideon, used to hold some power in the Empire. Same universe, all new characters, setting post-OT, and it works great.
You just need someone that has affection for and understands the IP. Jon Favreau and Dave Filoni obviously do. Filoni did a great job with Star Wars: Rebels and the final season of Clone Wars as well. (Not such a good job with Star Wars: Resistance… that one was admittedly weak. Probably because they were limited storywise because the show was tied too tightly to the sequel trilogy.)
On the other hand, JJ and the Solo movie just took the approach of “more callbacks!! more fanservice!! more nostalga!!”. Rise of Skywalker reminded me of an 80s James Bond flick - a meandering plot that existed merely to string together a series of cool set pieces.
One of the problems with the new trilogy was that it didn’t sufficiently widen the Star Wars universe, or, “Galaxy.” To most of us, Star Wars as only ever the movies. None of the other stuff matters, not even the tv shows that are still canon, let alone all the “legends” books.
So… not that it’s for me or anyone else in this thread to define “what Star Wars is,” but… what is Star Wars (without the Jedi, without the rebels, without the Empire)? I look to the Galaxy left to us by the NT, and I’m not even sure I care to know the answer any more. Which is very much different from how I walked away from the PT (which still sucks) or the OT. I’ll grant some of that diminished interest may come from aging, but then I’m a second generation Star Wars fan (what some might call a “millennial”), so aging alone can hardly explain it.
Let’s pack it up and go home boys, @jz78817 has declared our opinions invalid. Might as well hold off until George Lucas pops in and clears this up for us.
Well aside from calling it “Rise of Skywalker” ;). I do think @ASL_v2.0 has the right of it, that the sequel trilogy didn’t widen the universe. It shrunk it to basically one person - Rey. Even if they kept Kylo Ren alive that could have led to some really interesting ideas reqarding gray Jedi. But now what is there going forward?
There’s an entire galaxy out there. There’s thousands of years. Not everything has to be about the New Republic or some galactic war. That’s silly and it shoehorns a very specific ‘this is Star Wars’ on things and the fans don’t have that right.
Do something completely disconnected. Hell, remark the Magnificent Seven like it the comics (I’d keep the green rabbit, myself). Or go wild.
You think Star Wars has no where to go? Wait until we see whatever Taika Waititi comes up with something. Again, I’m not kidding about Tarantino. It might not have galactic stakes but it’ll be brilliantly written.
Or for God’s sake, see if you can lure Jim Jarmusch to do one. The writer director of ‘Only Lovers Left Alive’ and ‘Paterson’ doing a Star Wars movie? It won’t be about the war but it’ll be brilliant and captivating.
It’s time to stop thinking so small. Broaden the mind space and let it be what it can be…a big, wide palate with endless potential for story telling both epic and personal.
There sure is. But here’s the problem: how do you distinguish that galaxy from any other fantasy galaxy?
If I say that Ad Astra, for instance, is set in the same universe as the Die Hard series of films (and for all I know, it is), does that suddenly make it a Die Hard film? Or, to use the Star Wars lingo, A Die Hard Story?
The only major element that is left to me from the Star Wars galaxy is the force, but even then, the force isn’t really something I’d care to see explored on its own, independent of the Jedi/Sith mythos. For that matter, I don’t even care to see the Jedi or the Sith explored further. They’re all dead to me. In fact, apart from Rey, that’s canonically true. Not only are they dead, but, because of how poorly the Jedi Order was portrayed in the PT, I don’t even care to see their past, because who wants a movie centered around a bunch of creepy old monks who go around abducting children from their desperate parents living in bondage on desert planets without so much as batting an eye to the horrors around them. Even the WWII-era Wehrmacht gets better press than that.
Rian Johnson did at least one thing right in TLJ: he opened the door to rehabilitating the Jedi, by having Luke and then Rey come to see that the flaws in their ideology. The NT could have finished off by giving us a renewed Jedi Order or a successor to the Jedi Order that emphasized more of the gray, but TROS failed to capitalize on that one, most promising element. They can try and implement that in a future film, sure, but now it would be practically out of nowhere.
The difficulty with having an all-new Star Wars storyline with all-new characters in an all-new environment is that there’s nothing familiar for casual fans to latch onto and be invested in. Going back into Star Wars’s past and touching on familiar tropes and characters, like Han Solo or the Death Star or variants on Mandalorians and Yodas, or young Jedi padawans etc, which is what they’ve done so far, is the best way to give as many of the potential audience a way in.
Having said that, we are approaching the time where they can start to branch out. New characters are being introduced in comics and novels that can take you somewhere else. The Old Republic (set thousands of years earlier) is something that a lot of fans want, but there’s very little about that era which distinguishes it from the familiar era, it was designed deliberately to be “Star Wars without the Skywalker baggage”.
Instead they are about to introduce The High Republic, an era that is only a few hundred years earlier, Yoda will still be alive (though who knows if he’ll be around) and the Jedi will be more like a mediaeval order rather than a samurai monastic order. We’ll see how that goes, but potentially TV series and movies could stem from this new sandbox, that could open up a lot of new ideas while not alienating casual fans too much.
That’s what the makers of the new trilogy thought. They were wrong.
What made the original Star Wars great was that it was a fun movie. It wasn’t overly serious or reverent. And it had great characters. What they need to do it capture some of that light, upbeat, tongue-in-cheek spirit with new characters and new situations. I’m not optimistic though.
$5bn suggests otherwise. Your opinion of the movies is not what matters, you are not a casual fan, i.e. someone who only knows a few character names and can’t really remember very clearly what happened in the last one. What they needed to do was hit the ground running, try to renergise the fans who had lost faith in Star Wars post-JarJar, reintroduce Star Wars to people who only know Darth Vader and Princess Leia and get the droids names mixed up, and introduce Star Wars to a new generation. That’s a very difficult thing to get right.
Now, if it was me, I would have done it differently, as would anybody else who had that job, but I think The Force Awakens managed to achieve their goal very successfully. It was the follow-through where it went wrong. I like The Last Jedi, but it was divisive. I am very disappointed in Rise Of Skywalker. But no Director knows if what they have is going to work until it’s out there. They were riding on a high with a reliable franchise in proven hands, they didn’t know for sure but everything was lined up to be a runaway hit. In money terms they did just fine.
But that’s done now. Going forward they’re going to branch out, that’s clear from The High Republic. Though the Kenobi TV series is probably relying on familiarity, the others (the Cassian Andor Rogue One prequel series and whatever else comes next (Doctor Aphra maybe?)) will be going down some new paths.
That’s what made Solo my favorite non-OT film in the universe, because it doesn’t have the pretense of being epic, so it can’t be faulted for not achieving it, and it captured some of the fun of the originals in the process.
The others go through the motions of being epic without actually delivering on it very well. Minute for minute, they only have around as many crowning moments of awesome as an average Game of Thrones episode, which doesn’t cut it for a stand-alone film.
I didn’t see it that way. From how I saw it, Luke was basically saying so much of the problems in the galaxy was from the Jedi acting like they were the “keepers” of the Force. The Force hasn’t gone away, nor have those who can use it. They just won’t be forced into being in any Jedi order anymore.
I think us olds have to come to terms with the notion that Star Wars isn’t meant for us anymore. It’s going to be for people who are kids now, just like Ep. IV was for us when we were kids back then.
And no, just like I don’t think parents should try to force their kids to like the music they like, we shouldn’t be trying to force anyone to keep Star Wars the way it was in 1977. It’s not “ours.”
