Now, that would have been fine, except Carrie Fisher tragically died during post-production of TLJ, and her contribution to TRoS is notably very limited. You have to work with the actors you've already cast.įourth, of the OT 'big three' TLJ leans into setting up Leia as the primary character for a major role in the final film. A short timeskip - which TRoS is implied to have - is workable, anything longer, nope. For all sorts of reasons that should be obvious, that was never a path the next movie could take. The status of the Resistance is so low at the end of TLJ - there are people on this board who regularly participate in gaming groups larger than the number of Crait survivors - and Rey's character is still so monstrously underdeveloped, that a proper buildup to triumph against the First Order would take generations (something the film's coda pretty much explicitly implies, even though it's ridiculous to have a coda to part eight of nine). Third, leaning into the themes of TLJ requires an unrealistic timeskip. Obi-Wan doesn't have Force-using parents. It also manages to misinterpret existing themes, such as when TLJ rebukes the idea that you need to be of special lineage to use the Force, something that had always been true - ex. It simply is not possible for a franchise to swerve that heavily so long after it has been established. Second, TLJ is openly hostile to the themes of the franchise as a whole and disrespects beloved characters. This is most obvious with the theme of sacrifice: Holdo makes a heroic sacrifice that saves the Resistance, but five minutes later Finn tries to make a similar sacrifice and is prevented from doing so (which costs something like 100 lives btw), and then Luke shows up at the end to make a sacrifice that is totally pointless because it accomplishes nothing beyond embarrassing Kylo. The movie is an incoherent mess that relentlessly undercuts the various points its trying to make. The problem with the 'lean in to TLJ' strategy is manyfold.įirst, and most importantly, TLJ fails on its own terms. There's a lot to be said about completion. Even folks who hate hate hate the Ewoks still like the OT as a series. So we're still stuck in "angry fan mode". I honestly think that the sheer volume of hate for the series (and for the second and third films in particular) is precisely because the series was never really "finished" in any satisfying manner. But if there's one thing I can say it is that how a film in a series is viewed by fans at the time of release is often very different from how it is viewed when the series is complete, and is even more different than how it will be viewed years or decades later. There's simply no way to know how the entire ST might have been viewed (yes, even TLJ) if, instead of abandoning the plotlines and character development that was laid out, the final film in the series actually embraced them and did something useful with them. And it was a rousing success as a result. It doubled down on Yoda's coolness as a wise Jedi master. It built on the romance between Han and Leia. It opened with an entire sequence involving Han's rescue. Yet, instead of ignoring all of this, Lucas had the third film embrace Luke's relationship with Vader (made it central to the conflict and ultimate defeat of the Emperor, in fact). Lots of people hated that the film basically had no "win" for the good guys (other than merely escaping, but not all of them did). Some people hated that the "mighty Jedi master" was a freaking muppet! Heck. They hated that Han and not Luke became the romantic interest for Leia. They hated that Han was frozen in Carbonite. They hated that Vader was revealed to be Luke's father. There were tons of fans wailing about the events in ESB back in the day. We could even argue that some of those fans might have been brought back into the fold *if* you wrote a third film that used those elements but paid them off in a way that made the "bad stuff worth it in the end". The set of fans who hated it were going to continue hating it no matter what you do with the third film in the series. They recognized that they'd stabbed themselves and decided to just yank the knife back outExactly! They had a choice between "coherent completion of a story that some fans hate already" to "incoherent story that everyone will hate". The damage was not reversible, and panicking to try and win back fans who were already gone cost them good will among the people they hadn't alienated. While I get why Lucasfilm must have felt the need to pivot and walk back the Last Jedi, they really would have been smarter if they'd just not.
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