I don’t if it’s been discussed here, or anywhere on these forums already, and I know it’s been a few years since TLJ, but I’ve been thinking about this for a while without ever seeing it put into words anywhere else.
I think a lot of fans were disappointed with TLJ because of certain aspects of the film, such as
- How Luke’s character was utilized
- Who Rey’s parents were
- Who Snoke was
- Kylo Ren as an ineffective/childish villain
And so on…
While I can’t vouch for Rian Johnson’s
execution of the film/material, I don’t actually think some of these things are actually his fault. And once I say what I am going to hypothesize, I think some people might be less excited for IX.
I believe the problems of the ST to ultimately be the fault of two things: one, the requirement by Disney to have a “soft reboot” in order to bring in new fans unfamiliar to SW, especially in foreign markets; and two, J.J. Abrams’ love of a concept he calls “mystery boxes”, which I’ll explain in more detail.
As for the soft reboot side, it forced Abrams to include tropes, moments, and plot elements from ANH in order to be able to call TFA a “soft reboot”, thereby drawing criticism as being somewhat unoriginal. And speaking as to wanting the foreign markets, I lived in Brazil for a few years. Where I was, very few people had ever seen a single Star Wars film. But Disney is a big international company, and has been for decades. All of the Pixar films I saw there had the text in the movies translated, like destinations at the airport, words on menus or buildings or what have you. The effort put into dubbing the films into Portuguese was phenomenal usually. Of course Disney would want this to work for Star Wars.
But on to my main point. JJ has this concept he has spoken about many times that he refers to as his “mystery box”. Essentially, he believes that what interests people the most is the idea of a mystery, something to solve or figure out. However, he usually doesn’t care/doesn’t know what’s
in the box. I mean, look at Lost. How many people were immensely dissatisfied with the ending to that show? He had no idea what he was doing. And that’s the problem here. Most every major problem with TLJ can be traced back to JJ and his unfinished mystery boxes that he put into place rather than just write a story. I mean, who’s Maz Kanata? Who was Max von Sidow’s character whose name I don’t even know because it isn’t in the film? How did he get a map? How did she get the Graflex? How did the First Order get the manpower/funding for all of these ships/soldiers/weapons/time to build a Death Star
into a planet?
JJ wanted his big literal cliffhanger shot at the end of TFA, and wanted everyone to be searching for Luke the way they were looking for Obi-Wan in ANH. Except, if you have such a big cliffhanger at the end of your film, the next one has to pick up immediately. Which is not typically how Star Wars has progressed, and led to some problems in the narrative. Furthermore, there really were only so many reasons he would have run off on his own the way JJ had it. This doesn’t mean RJ executed those reasons perfectly, but that he was limited in his choices by JJ.
Next, who is Rey? Who are her parents? Why does it matter? Well, in all honesty, it shouldn’t have. There was no mystery at the beginning of ANH. The idea that Luke’s father was Vader didn’t come up until ESB was in pre-production, and very few people were privy to that information throughout the production of the film. So why should it have mattered who Rey’s parents were? Couldn’t she just have been a person? But JJ’s mystery box had to give us something to try and solve, and bad YouTube channels like Mike Zeroh and the Film Theorist went to work for two years pumping out theory after theory as to who Rey might be. (The same thing with Snoke.) RJ surely sees all of this and decides that this type of story isn’t really SW, and isn’t conducive to telling a story. So, everyone that thought Rey was a Skywalker/Solo/Fett/Binks/etc? Ultimately not important, and frankly shouldn’t have been from the beginning. Unfortunately, there are two things people don’t like—being told their guess was wrong, and being told their guess didn’t matter at all. (And again, this applies to Snoke.) I mean, to illustrate this, let’s imagine it
had been revealed in TLJ that Rey was related to someone. Better yet, let’s briefly look at a film where
that happens. In the last Fantastic Beasts movie (spoilers ahead for that), we find out that Nagini used to be a human woman with a blood curse, and that Credence is actually a Dumbledore. Far from making the world larger, or making characters stronger, it made the world feel smaller, and the characters weaker. Because now these characters are only significant due to who they are related to. That’s like getting passed over for a promotion due to nepotism.
Finally, Kylo Ren feeling ineffective as a villain. Again, I believe this to be the fault of JJ and the “soft reboot”. Without Luke in the film, there must be a final lightsaber battle as has become customary in SW films. Except, who is there to fight? Just Rey and Kylo. She can’t lose, because that isn’t how ANH goes, so she has to win. Which brings up complaints of being a Mary Sue, and so forth. (Coincidentally, it’s this need to allow the main characters to escape/win that makes the OT stormtroopers look like bad shots. It’s called plot armor.) Next movie comes along, and RJ knows he can’t just have them fight again, because it’s been too little time for either of them to have trained significantly enough to change the results. And now, few people feel that IX has any tension from a Rey good/Kylo bad standpoint, because she’s essentially beaten him twice. Which is probably why all these theories are going around about Rey turning to the dark side and Ben Solo having to be the “Rise of Skywalker”, so to speak.
I don’t think that any of these reasons are enough to make up for Canto Bight, or the production design, or Rose’s character (or Benício Del Toro), or Holdo, or any other flawed execution of otherwise sound concepts. But it something to consider, whether you like the ST or not. And I have enjoyed both TFA and TLJ, but these are some of the main reasons I believe that they have not risen to their highest potential from a story perspective.
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