Let me put it another way. After Star Wars I went into Empire "expecting" things to be better than they were. The Rebels had won. Yeah, there was the title "The Empire Strikes Back" telling us that there was going to be pushback, but to what extent, and how effectively, we didn't know. I certainly didn't know the structure of a multi-act saga when I was 5. Or the Hero's Journey. I don't know how many in the audience -- even in their 20s or 30s -- did. I don't know what people were
expecting going into "Star Wars 2" (if you mentally automatically added "Electric Boogaloo, take a drink)... But I have a feeling it wasn't the Rebels being on the run, getting routed out of their new base, Han being the one to end up with Leia, Luke getting beaten by Vader and losing his hand, or Han ending up frozen and delivered to Jabba. My expectations were well and truly subverted.
And I was reeling. I didn't know what to think. I can certainly tell you it was hell waiting three more years to find out what happened.
Then again with the Special Editions. I was expecting what all the press was saying -- re-done visual effects to compensate for embryonic technology at the time. I was
not expecting all the new errors (all the X-Wings at the Battle of Yavin being Red 2 with R2-D2 in the back and Luke in the cockpit... or the lack of appropriate shadows from the altered light sources of the newly opened up Cloud City), and I was
certainly not expecting all the poor choices/additions George made (shot-blocking ronto, distracting slapstick, narrative-breaking Jabba scene, fully-visible wampa, Luke screaming as he falls, the sarlacc's beak, etc.). I think the change I liked best was, of all things, the addition of the "interhull passthrough" on the
Falcon when Lando rescues Luke. Fixed a thing that needed fixing and looked good.
(Those expectations kept getting subverted as George kept tinkering, even after the theatrical SE release. Hayden Christansen, Tem Morrison, and all that.)
Then the Prequels. Having grown up with a lot of the Lucas'-notes-derived lore, we
knew the Clone Wars had happened over a decade or so, ending maybe fifteen years before the movies, that somewhere in there the Jedi were discredited and purged, and the Republic shifted to Empire. Leia and Luke were written in Star Wars as having had young-but-still-in-their-lifetimes memories of the later stages of the Clone Wars. Of course, this was also when Anakin and Vader were still separate people, and Luke was a few years older than Leia because they weren't twins... But still. What we ended up
getting in the Prequels? Expectations so massively subverted it isn't even funny. And not in the good way of Empire (for me, anyway -- I know others differed and differ on both Empire and the Prequels).
So it's a good point to try to consciously go into a new installment or adaptation of a thing knowing it might not unroll for the audience in the way you had come up with in your head. That's not the same thing as "turning your brain off". A movie or TV show still needs to stand up internally, characters still need to behave believably. Empire, to keep the comparisons up, falls down on that score. They were in the Hoth system. When the
Falcon finally shakes Imperial pursuit, they're in the Anoat system. And from there, they head to the Bespin system... All without hyperdrive.
How?! That's bugged me since i was still in single digits.
That's not intended to give a pass to the newer films. If anything, I'd prefer Lucasfilm 1) learn from George's mistakes, both structural and stylistic, and 2) strive to always surpass the existing body of works. Not like constantly trying to out-wow the audience, but like... "Okay, here's where this plot point was kind of weak in the last film -- let's try to avoid that sort of thing in the next one". And as
I have said repeatedly in this thread and others, I think most of the problems
everyone has with the new crop of Star Wars movies -- fans and haters alike -- would be solved by uncoupling themselves from the trilogy model -- which was a bad call on George's part in the first place. I and others have argued how the OT suffered for it, the PT suffered for it, the ST is suffering for it, and the standalones are suffering for it. Let the story be told in as much run-time as it takes, broken over as many episodes as needed.
I don't care if it's only ever going to be my own mental self-gratification, but my re-write project is intended in part to see if I can make all the stuff we've gotten work, call out and fix the truly unworkable elements, and to show others an alternate way it might have been structured and delivered, and leave it to them to say which they think is better. Every movie so far -- including Rogue One and Solo -- fits in a numbered saga. But not as they've been delivered. This project also addresses George's
other big early misstep -- starting at the actual beginning and going ever forward.
A lot of the criticisms I see leveled at TFA, TLJ, Rogue One, and Solo wouldn't even get a look-in if the overall story had been plotted out (at least in rough terms) and delivered more or less in sequence. All the unanswered questions about the thirty years between ROTJ and TFA that the audience
needs to know to make sense of the new films (not counting the unanswered questions that help clarify things along the way, which are different), that have been being filled in piecemeal and scattershot from the latter film's release up to the present and still ongoing? If those plot points had been delivered to the audience prior to the ST, we'd all understand how things got to this point better and probably be far more accepting of things as they are. Rogue One and Solo "telling the origin stories no one asked for". Delivered in-sequence, they work great. And even as after-the-fact delves, I enjoy them (prefer the first version of Rogue One over the final cut, though). Who cares that we weren't asking for them, they were a nice treat. Someone gives you a nice surprise gift, you're going to shove it back in their face angrily because "you didn't ask for it"?
All of this requires the self-awareness to be mindful of the fact that, as humans, we have expectations, figure out what they are, and try to set them to one side going into any serialized offering. Also a mindfulness that missteps have been being made with the sequential presentation of Star Wars since 1975, so don't expect the information we have bridging any two installments to be the only information we ever get bridging those two installments. Yeah, it'd work better linear. That's what we in the Western World tend to be familiar with and prefer in our storytelling. But like it or not, we've got a non-linear pointillist storytelling exercise underway.
But none of that requires "turning your brain off" to enjoy it. There
are a few turn-your-brain off moments in Star Wars going all the way back to the first film, but those moments truly are not whole films. Not even the excruciating "love story" that infiltrates fully half of AOTC. Not even the "good idea executed badly" of Canto Bight. Not even the "we get what they were going for but it needed to have been tweaked slightly to work better" of the chase and Holdo. I enjoyed far more of TLJ than I
didn't enjoy. When I tally up the specific beats that fall flat (from my admittedly-subjective-but-I-try-to-be-as-objective-as-possible point of view), I end up with something shy of fifteen minutes out of about 145 of actual content that kicks me out of the experience. But, again because of the way the human brain works, those fifteen minutes, because of the discordance of the experience, is what we remember.
