clmayfield
Member
Star Wars has it's roots in myths, the heroes journey.
I just saw it a second time. Admittedly, I liked it more the second time than the first, but I was finally able to put my finger on the problem I have with this film and why it feels disjointed from TFA, which I loved. In the OT, you had two things: 1) the hero's journey, and 2) a ragtag group of hero's facing seemingly impossible odds. From the second you saw Darth Vader in ANH, he was terrifying. Our heroes never met him face to face in the first film and you felt like if they did, they would be crushed (dogfight aside). Basically, Luke wasn't ready to face him and that much was clear.
Enter TFA. Rey has all sorts of powers that are not explainable by what we know about the Force thus far... as someone who has watched the previous 6 movies, I needed that explained and expected a fuller explanation in the next film. I was fine with not getting it at the time, figuring I just needed patience to let the story "breathe." You see Rey beat Kylo Ren in hand to hand combat. He had years of tutelage under Luke Skywalker and then Snoke. Granted, he had been shot prior to their duel and wasn't at his best, so you can see a world in which he might best her, but they are pretty evenly matched. Kylo Ren is no Darth Vader.
But Kylo has a teacher... you don't know if he is a force user, but he seems very powerful and full of knowledge. At the end of TFA, Snoke talked of completing Kylo's training. And Rey flies off to Ach-To to meet Luke Skywalker. I found this intriguing because now you have two heroes journeys, one on the Dark Side and one on the Light Side. When they meet again, one might have the upper hand based on how they develop. Well, we know how that went. Luke Skywalker trained Rey for a day. Kylo had no training in that time. And then Kylo kills Snoke... I LOVE the idea of seeing an apprentice on the Dark Side kill his master. The problem is WHEN he did this.
Kylo has received no further training... and this is Star Wars, not The Highlander, so he is not getting any more powerful. He is at the end of his journey. Luke even compares Rey to Kylo Ren, raw force power wise. So Kylo and Reay are evenly matched except that Rey now has force ghosts and the ancient Jedi texts (page turners, they were not, I know) to help her accumulate power until their next meeting.So basically, Kylo is outmatched and we (as an audience who has watched the prior 8 films) know it. And this was the problem with over-endowing Rey with too much power from the beginning COMBINED with killing Snoke in this installment. Her success is all but guaranteed. Had they made Kylo more powerful than Rey at the outset, this wouldn't be an issue or had they kept Snoke alive and killed Skywalker, this wouldn't be an issue, but they did neither. These were two bad storytelling choices. And they were made by different writer/ directors, which is the problem with having multiple authors.
If you look at the 3 Act play story structure, you know that at the end of the second installment, things should look bleak. Now you can look at the Resistance and note that their ranks are decimated at the end of Act 2, but in the OT, you never really got a sense of how big or small the rebellion was. You knew that the empire had a ton of ships and could build a space station the size of a planet, but in the end, the spaceship dog-fights were window dressing for what we knew would always come down to our heroes coming face to face with Darth Vader, a character of immense strength. And if you didn't get that in ANH, you saw him deflect a blaster shot with his hand and cut Luke's hand off at the end of ESB.
So even though the ranks of the Resistance are decimated, our core group of heroes in intact, and you know that if Rey faces Kylo again, she could either best him in a duel or turn him. This is not a good place to be in the second installment of a trilogy. We should be feeling pretty down about our heroes' chances. At the end of ESB, you weren't really sure about Han's whereabouts. Luke had just lost a hand. The guy piloting the Millennium Falcon had just betrayed Han. And you were left to digest the fact the Darth Vader might be Luke's father, and if so, Obi Wan, Luke's teacher, had lied to Luke. We don't feel like we are at the end of Act 2 in TLJ as we did in ESB. I am not using these examples to compare the trilogies, but merely to point out a properly structured story like we had in the OT and everyone here has watched the OT. (I could do it with The Godfather trilogy as well, but I can't assume everyone has seen that a number of times).
You might argue that, well, that is the film you want, not the film they made. OK, that is right in terms of wanting to see parallel hero's journey storylines. But not in analyzing where we are in this narrative. It feels like we are at the very beginning of this story or the very end... either we are in Act I, or midway through Act III. So this film really puts the trilogy off pace. I think Rian Johnson reveled in taking a story as JJ Abrams had set up and threw it for a loop to give the audience something less predictable, but in doing so gave us less character development and in trying to be unpredictable, I think he made the outcome more predictable. In short, there is less to look forward to in Ep IX.