Yeah, I didnt buy that at all.
Right. Made no sense.
Not really, since that all happened sorta off screen.
You also have the “these aren’t the droids you’re looking for scene”. It’s important because it shows a bunch of stormtroopers just doing mundane stormtrooper shit. Namely patrolling around keeping the peace and (and searching for suspected insurgents). They aren’t just going house to house kicking down doors and brutalizing people for no reason (Uncle Own, Aunt Beru, and a bunch of Jawas notwithstanding). People aren’t running around screaming in fear at the arrival of Imperial troops.
Like it or not, people are used to seeing an Imperial presence from time to time and generally know enough to mind their own business if they want to stay out of trouble.
Contrast that with the First Order’s pursuit of Rey and Finn on Jakku. I mean what was the conversation the stormtroopers had when they spotted the droid they were looking for with some random scavenger girl and AWOL out of uniform stormtrooper? “Quick! Call in an airstrike in case one of them knows how to pilot one of these junky spacecraft!!”
Are you being serious? That is just a blurb written by a marketing person, that’s not the totality of the movie. The Last Jedi isn’t like any other Star Wars movie. The internet lost its collective mind over it (for better or for worse, a lot of it for worse). Rian Johnson went so far against the grain by deliberately not “just re-telling the original story” that J.J. Abrams found it necessary to come back to take over the production of The Rise of Skywalker in order to undo a lot of what Rian Johnson did. He even referred to TLJ as a “pendulum swing.”
What grain? There was no direction, no oversight, no guidance whatsoever as to where the story was “supposed” to go. The only thing Rian Johnson could possibly do was make up something on his own. You can’t get mad at someone for not following directions when you never gave them any directions.
I would think that the real world events of the last seven years are evidence that just because the Bad Guys were defeated a generation ago doesn’t mean there aren’t still lots of people who believe in their ideals and want them back.
Right: we knew that for better or for worse, the Empire was the government. But what was the First Order? Was it the government of Jakku? Was it the government of ANY planet? Was it just an army? Who knows? And what exactly was the Resistance? Was it the army of the New Republic? No? It would have been nice to know these things. They could have clarified everything in 30 seconds, if they’d bothered.
Of course, if you came to that conclusion in 1977 as the result of watching ANH, you would’ve been wrong. The novelization, which was canon at the time, states that the Emperor was old, infirm, and unaware of what was being done in his name by power-hungry generals like Tarkin.
Seems to me that the title crawl did that just fine.
Yeah, all we knew is the First Order “rose from the ashes of the Empire” because Luke disappeared.
And for that matter, what is the Resistance? Wikipedia describes it as “Leia’s private paramilitary force”. Like the Wagner Group or Blackwater?
The whole sequel trilogy felt like a private war between two independent space militias that almost had no bearing on the rest of the Galaxy until the Galaxy decided to put an end to it. I mean at least compared to the complexity and politics of all the other films and post RotJ Disney shows.
The grain of the previous Star Wars movies, particularly the original trilogy, that says “This is a story about Skywalkers.” Johnson changed the thoughline from the importance of Luke Skywalker to a story about the importance of nobodies. The message is anyone can make a difference in the galaxy; you don’t have to be a Skywalker with a destiny to be a hero, your parents can be drunken junk dealers.
Johnson went against the established grain of Luke’s characterization. He’s given up. He literally ran away from the mess he created. He says he’s going to burn everything down because he’s a failure and it is all over. This characterization is not anything remotely like the Luke Skywalker of the original trilogy.
I don’t know what point you’re making here. You’re saying Rian Johnson didn’t get any direction from Disney? They never had any executive meetings? They didn’t give him any notes?
I think going from an idealistic kid to a cynical recluse in 40 years is a realistic arc. Now, it is quite possible the story of that decline would be more interesting than the story of its consequences and ultimate redemption.
Having your greatest pupil turn to the Dark Side and destrroy your life’s work, exactly like what happened to Luke’s mentor before him, will do that to you.
As opposed to the grain of the previous movies saying “Nobodies can become somebody”? You can’t follow all of the beats of the original movies exactly, in a world that already has the original movies. You have to pick some to follow and some not to.
“The old mentor figure has given up and went into hiding” is straight out of Episode IV. If you’re going to try to follow the original movies, Luke has to be like that.
Right, exactly. They literally didn’t.
Obi Wan goes into hiding so he can watch over Luke and to eventually get him back into the fight. He’s playing the long game. Luke just straight up ran away. He gave up. Their situations are very different.
The kid who was literally created by the force is a nobody? His son is a nobody? His daughter, the senator and princess, is a nobody?
Luke isn’t like that. Thats the point. Obi Wan is biding his time to bring Luke into the fold. Luke wants to (literally) burn the whole thing down. Johnson is subverting what Abrams set up. If Abrams had directed TLJ, yeah, it probably would have been a beat for beat ripoff of Degobah. But like Snoke and Rey’s parentage, Johnson zigs when the conventional wisdom says he’s going to zag.
Well, now you know why TLJ isn’t just a re-tell of the original story.
Their situations are different - because Luke, despite knowing what happened between Obi-Wan and Anakin, still failed in the exact same way to lead his student down the right path. And unlike Obi-Wan he can’t blame the Council, or Snoke, or even Palpatine - it’s his own fault, and he almost failed twice in the process when he almost killed Ben in his sleep.
TLJ Luke isn’t a wide-eyed optimist farm boy from Tattooine anymore. He’s a tired old man who failed himself, failed his students, failed his master, and sees no way forward. He doesn’t have a secret heir to the Skywalker legacy to watch over and train when the time is right - there’s nothing left for him to do but to die and let the Jedi die with him so they can never fail again. That’s what makes his redemptive sacrifice all the more powerful, because it shows that in the end he did learn what Yoda was trying to teach him - a Jedi uses the Force to defend, never to attack.
That’s true. Johnson went against the grain of everything we had come to expect from Luke. He isn’t the same. A reason why TLJ can’t be called a re-tell.
Is anyone the same person at 53 that they were at 19?
I would like to point out that Rian Johnson is not who hid Luke away on an island so he would be difficult to find. JJ Abrams did that. Johnson then had to find a way to make that situation narratively compelling. The point of a second act in a trilogy is to put the heroes on the back foot, and Johnson did that in every way he could. That’s what made the movie structurally similar to ESB, yet also full of unexpected twists on the usual way these stories play out. He really put them through the wringer with seemingly no way out.
JJ Abrams then had to find a satisfying conclusion. This is a director/showrunner who is famously bad at endings. TLJ could’ve been redeemed in the eyes of the haters if the final chapter had built on what Rian Johnson had done. Instead it backtracked and overwrote it all with a haphazard jumble of poorly conceived comic book tropes.
Abrams didn’t seem to change Han’s or Leia’s basic character traits too much, even when they had plenty of reason to change considering their son.
But I’d say it’s not really about time changing a person, it’s that Johnson’s Luke is a complete 180 from everything we ever knew about him.