I disagree they could have done Thrawn. In fact at christmas I gave my brother-in-law the trilogy and told him that reading it would make him more pissed at the potential these movies had. Creating a new bad guy isn’t impossible but Thrawn is new to most of the fan base. Even if they had time shifted it so that he was attacking the next generation and Luke was just their Yoda.
Really, the movies were ok on their own but its the lack of a coherent story that killed them. There are several well written stories in the EU that could have stolen and brought back into cannon or they could have just written this trilogy as a trilogy up front and had a single arching story. The characters, CGI, acting and directing were good it was just the writing and overall tone that failed.
They are all entertaining popcorn flicks of varying quality. There is no “travesty” other than the rabid hate some people have for this films for some ridiculous reason. I have yet to hear one single complaint about the new trilogy that does not equally apply to the originals.
There is a significant percentage of the fandom that strongly rejects these movies, and they have a consistent core set of reasons for that. It’s not to be hand-waved away as “ridiculous.”
Yeah you have: That they don’t fit the storyline and world building of the OT, and they do not do justice to the characters of the OT. They had that duty because, well, they’re sequels. The OT didn’t have that duty because they were originals.
I haven’t seen episode 9, but 8 and 7 were at least reasonably entertaining. I think the problem that most people that are fans of the series have with them is that they seem to be designed to wring out every dollar from people willing to spend money on Star Wars products, and have practically no artistic value. If they were standalone action-adventure movies, no one would really care about them, and they wouldn’t have made nearly as much money as they did. Perhaps if they had been standalone movies they could have done a better job since they wouldn’t have had to shoehorn in all the elements from the previous movies that fans expected. But that would make them entirely different movies.
Expectations that the new Disney movies would be like the Disney Marvel movies were most likely to blame for a lot of the criticism, but Marvel is an entirely separate studio that just happens to be owned by the same media giant. Marvel is really running a theater-based ongoing anthology series, though, while Star Wars is just a bunch of related films. Marvel really knows what the core of each film needs to be so that it will work with its plan, but for Star Wars it looks like each person writing and directing just did whatever they wanted.
The original trilogy was a weak ark, but it had a great start, a fantastic middle movie and a weak final movie. This trilogy had a decent start (if derivative [like VI]), a weak middle, and a controversial end chapter.
Yeah, I think buddying up the elderly versions of Luke, Han and Leia would have felt too much like a rehash. The “buddy team” in this trilogy was primarily Rey, Finn and Poe.
And I felt the falling apart of the original trio worked well as a symbol of the disintegration and disillusionment following the victory euphoria of the end of the first trilogy. Han and Leia break up, still united by a disappointing son, Luke is a recluse on a faraway island, the First Order is jackbooting around again, what was it all for? The final trilogy, with all its flaws, was at least posing the interesting question of how and why you continue to struggle for victory once you’re old enough to know (or have learned from recent history) that victory’s not forever.
This nails it for me. Great epics have arcs. I don’t know what Lucas had in mind for episodes 7,8 and 9, but I’m sure it wasn’t more or less redoing episode 4.
The thing that bugged me most about TFA was that our heroes basically screwed everything up. It made the triumph at the end of RotJ turn to ashes.
And the funny thing is, I like the extended universe stuff- the animated series, Solo, Rogue One, and so on. Even the Lego stuff. It’s well done, explains the backstory, fleshes out the universe, etc…
I really didn’t have a huge issue with the prequels, to be honest. They weren’t awesome, but they honestly weren’t much worse than the originals. The first movie (ANH) is kind of… bare, but in a good way. We get enough back story to not make it confusing, we get a decent, coherent story, and a lot of action.
From there, ESB was WELL done- good story, good pacing, better dialogue, etc… Probably because it was written by Lawrence Kasdan and directed by Irvin Kirshner, not George Lucas like the rest.
ROTJ was similarly decent, although the introduction of the Ewoks was the start of the blatant merchandising/aiming for children that has tainted the rest of the franchise. By that I mean that ANH and ESB both had toys related to them (I had a bunch of them, FWIW), but they were X-wing fighters, AT-ATs, etc… aimed mostly at older boys. Ewoks seem to have been clearly included to appeal to a younger, and/or more feminine audience and as a sort of comic relief. But despite the presence of the Ewoks, the movie was good and served as a fine closure to the trilogy, or so we thought…
And all three were geared toward telling the story of Luke Skywalker vs. Darth Vader concurrently with the Rebellion vs. the Empire.
Skip forward about 14 years to 1997, and the prequels came out, with “The Phantom Menace”. Not the worst movies ever made, but Lucas couldn’t seem to decide whether he wanted to make serious movies about the fall of the Old Republic and Anakin’s concurrent turn to the dark side, or a epic space opera like ANH, or something that would sell merchandise to little kids. So he tried to do all three, but not really successfully- how serious of a trilogy can you have with Jar Jar and goofy battle droids that are supremely incompetent? Revenge of the Sith was actually decent, because it didn’t do much in the way of trying to be a kids movie at the same time as a serious action movie.
Still, through all three prequels, there was a clear overall story arc- the fall of the Old Republic and rise of the Empire/Palpatine, and the descent of Anakin to the dark side and transformation into Darth Vader. That’s the story that all 3 movies told-
The new trilogy seems to have been more cynically initiated- if you were to describe the story that ALL THREE MOVIES was trying to tell, I think you’d be pretty hard pressed to figure out the two main themes- the story of Rey, I guess, although they basically don’t give us any meaningful back story about her until the third movie. The Resistance vs. the First Order, I suppose, although that’s sort of abbreviated in that the First Order and the Resistance are fully formed at the beginning of the first movie, and we don’t get a lot of backstory about how that happened, or what’s going on in the galaxy, etc… Kylo Ren is similarly introduced from nothing- we learn more back story about him than anybody else. But despite that, he never manages to actually be a convincingly evil bad guy. He always strikes me as someone who’s being evil out of frustration and lack of knowledge of how else to solve his problems, than someone who is really diabolical and flat out evil, like Palpatine or Vader (most of the time). And the rest of the characters seem to be there to fill open slots- we never find out much about Poe or Finn when you really get down to it, and nor does BB-8 really get a personality like R2-D2 or C3PO did. Luke plays a weird role in the second movie- going from hermit to noble self-sacrifice in the span of a movie, and Leia similarly goes through the first movie as a Force-sensitive regular person, to the second as something of a Jedi, and in the third, it’s finally revealed that she’s at least partially Jedi-trained, if not a full-fledged Jedi. WTF? Why didn’t they reveal that early on? It didn’t seem to serve any narrative purpose NOT to, and would have had a lot of the other stuff make a lot more sense.
But like I’ve said before, it seems to come down to a lack of positive control from above w.r.t. the expected storyline, or for that matter, much inspiration in terms of the storyline at all. It really does strike me that someone at Disney decided we were due for a third trilogy, and decided a vague rehash of the first trilogy was just what we needed, because it would allow them to spin up a new generation with new toys and gew-gaws, not because it told a unique story that puts a final cap on the previous two trilogies.
The prequels were pretty terrible, especially The Phantom Menace. The look and feel, some of the characters like Obi Wan, and some of the action sequences were great though. The plot with Trade Federations and all was pretty obscure and boring, I think they could have streamlined that. Make the droid army menacing instead of cartoony and get rid of Jar Jar and you’d have a solid trilogy.
The Clone Wars series gave me more appreciation of clone troopers, Obi Wan, and Anakin. The Clone Wars version of Anakin and his padawan Ahsoka were teriffic characters. Clone Wars Obi Wan needs his own movie.
I thought The Force Awakens was great, but I don’t want to watch it again. I didn’t like the major character they killed and that makes it hard for me to rewatch I think. Overall it was really just a rehash of episode 4 (The original Star Wars.)
The Last Jedi was a steaming pile of shit. Not only did it actively shit on the original trilogy, but it actively shit on The Force Awakens. The plot was nonsensical and boring.
I haven’t watched The Rise of Skywalker, I still have the bitter taste of TLJ in my mouth.
If anything TLJ made me appreciate the prequels much much more, especially episode 2 and 3. And I want to rewatch Clone Wars. You don’t realize how good something was until things get worse. Yes the prequel plots were complicated and boring, but at least they made sense!
My $0.02:
I strongly disagree with the point that the sequel trilogy (ST) is undoing or “crapping on” everything accomplished in the original trilogy (OT). The idea that the Empire collapsed and disappeared at the end of Return of the Jedi just because the Emperor was dead is facile. Every planetary governor, every fleet admiral, would still be in place, just not receiving orders from above. (As I recall, the original end of ROTJ did not show “end of the Empire” celebrations on various planets including Coruscant; that was added later.) And why wouldn’t the Emperor, famous (with the audience, not necessarily in-universe) for his planning, have some sort of scheme for succession or survival?
Thus, the ideas that (1) something like the First Order would still be out there Empire-ing without the Emperor, and (2) the Emperor has a backup plan, don’t strike me in the least odd. One of the good parts of the lackluster prequel trilogy was showing that Palpatine (1) prepares and executes exceedingly elaborate plans and (2) knows, or at least claims to know, something about coming back to life. IMHO, the efforts of the OT heroes weren’t “in vain” just because the ST showed they didn’t destroy the Empire and all its components in a single stroke, anymore than destroying the Death Star in the very first movie was pointless just because the Empire still had the resources to build another.
I’ll admit that *The Last Jedi *was flawed. It was the opposite of a deus ex machina: the New Republic eliminated at a stroke and the Resistance ridiculously and almost comically whittled down just to have its victory in the last movie be that much more impressive. Things weren’t nearly so bleak for the good guys at the end of The Empire Strikes Back.
the way I chose to interpret it is that while the Resistance as it existed up through the end of TLJ was really a bunch of rag-tag leftovers from the Rebel Alliance. what happened near the end of Rise of Skywalker is that they were able to convince the “fence sitters” out there to get involved. The Empire was huge, the First Order was still huge, and there still would be tons of people/groups out there who would seek to get out from under its thumb given the opportunity.
This is another thing that bugs me, which began with RotS . You pretty much had to keep up with the EU to know what was going on. I collect sf books but avoid Star Wars novels (Star Trek novels also) and never saw the Clone Wars until much later. So, in the beginning of RotS we have the death of a very major character who we’ve never seen before.
I don’t mind the movies that fill in the holes. I like Rogue One reasonably well, and I’ve watched the first four episodes of The Mandalorian, and like that also.
I blame JJ for much of this. He did the same thing with Spock in the ST reboot.
I wouldn’t say you HAD to keep up for RotS, but it probably helped.
The issue with the latest trilogy is that they didn’t explain ANY of the backstory. Which worked in ANH, because it didn’t matter for the purposes of the movie. We knew there was an Empire, we knew there was a Rebellion, we knew there had been Jedi Knights, and we knew that Obi-Wan had once been one. How long ago, etc… wasn’t really relevant.
But in TFA, we KNEW that the Empire was decapitated 30 years prior, and it was assumed that the Rebellion would become the New Republic and have a period of peace and prosperity. Of course, that wouldn’t happen immediately we knew.
But what we got in TFA was being dropped in ANH-style, to a situation where there’s a First Order, and a Resistance, and a guy named Kylo Ren and a guy named Snoke, and a Starkiller Base. And Han Solo’s gone, Luke’s gone, Lando’s gone, Chewbacca’s gone, with Leia the only person back, still a Princess, and apparently in charge of the Resistance. All of that with NO explanation whatsoever.
Is all that somewhere in the EU? I sort of doubt it was by the time TFA was released, or there’d have been some kind of noise on the nerdy fronts about that prior to the movie, and I don’t recall ANYTHING about that whatsoever.
That’s a major problem in my book- it’s not in the movie, and it’s not in the EU- it’s just manufactured from whole cloth and dropped on us like a ton of lead at the beginning of the movie, and followed up by a bunch of frenetic action scenes.
I think the point of TFA was to prove that assumption wrong. I pointed it out in another thread- and John Bredin brought it up in this one- that the Empire wasn’t just going to up and disappear. it was too big, too powerful, and too full of avarice to allow the power vacuum to last for long. The Rebellion scored a huge victory by taking out the Emperor, Vader, and Death Star II in one swoop, but there were still enormous fleets of Imperial ships all over the place.
I mean, it’s not even that unrealistic. A lot of us remember the jubilation when the Iron Curtain fell and the Soviet Union collapsed, and where have we ended up? Putin.
I don’t think it needed any explanation other than RotJ wasn’t the decisive final victory people thought it was.
I agree with all of this. The focus of the new trilogy needed to be the new trio, and having the old cast as a whole involved in the action would take that focus away. If you have a movie featuring the adventure of Rey, Finn, and Poe AND the adventures of Han, Luke, and Leia, you’ve got way too many characters running around to give any of them real attention. The adventures of Rey, Finn, and Poe with Special Guest Han works a lot better.
I like a lot of the setup in TFA for the original cast - I like the idea of Kylo’s turn being a hand grenade that just blew up everyone’s lives, but I think the movies took it too far in basically erasing everything that was accomplished in the original movies. Luke running off to be a hermit after his nephew turns evil is great, but why not let him leave a functioning Jedi Temple behind? He can still be the guy who refounded the Jedi Order, while still feeling himself a personal failure. Han and Leia splitting up is fine - kind of expected, really, given their personalities - but at the end of the movies, both of them and their only kid are dead. Their marriage didn’t just fail, literally nothing good came of it. The galaxy would have been better off if they’d just stayed friends. I loved the EU stuff with a revitalized New Republic still fighting an Imperial Remnant. The First Order is a reasonable (if unnecessary) stand-in for the Imperials, but literally all we see of the New Republic is a reaction shot of a bunch of people at a cocktail party right before their planet blows up. They’re comically ineffectual in the new trilogy, getting rolled by the First Order at every turn. They’re also, apparently, dicks. The backstory for why Leia is with the Resistance is that someone leaked to the press that she was the daughter of Darth Vader, and she was forced from office in the ensuing scandal.
The first thing you see in Star Wars is “A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away…” The idea is that we’re about to see a story about legends, about people who did something so momentous that stories are told about them for generations. At the end of Rise of Skywalker, what is there that people would remember about any of the original characters?
I agree with the OP, but I take it one step further. They shouldn’t have stopped after the first trilogy, they should have stopped after the first film. As I explained here (in March 2019):
ETA: I haven’t seen ROS and probably won’t, at least not in the theaters.