#I saw Rise of Skywalker this past year thanks to being bored and access to my sister's Disney+ account

[cbrownjc]

I sometimes feel like I could rant forever about Abrams and his damn mystery boxes. Anyone can write a "cool setup" but that doesn't mean they are an actual genus wrt actual storytelling. Yet, Abrams got that label for doing just, and only, that.

And yes, it was because he started on TV, creating shows and writing pilot episodes. That's only one episode of a possible who-knows-how long long-format story. If the show is picked up, we can be talking about anywhere to almost 100 episodes, maybe even more. And, most importantly, a writers' room full of people to pick up the slack and even come up with solutions and answers to the mystery box setups he kept coming up with.

But there is a huge difference between telling a story in that format vs a 2+-hour, 3-film trilogy.

And The Force Awakens showed him trying to do a tv approach to the writing for those movies. And that was never going to work. Because unlike tv shows, movies don't have writer's rooms to cover your own writing faults. What you had were three separate directors, each who have their own egos, left to come up with a story for the films they were scheduled to make. Of course they were all going to come up with their own ideas, and none of those ideas would mesh.

So yeah, it only took until The Last Jedi, for it to be clear there was no actual story plan for the sequel trilogy. And there was nothing The Rise of Skywalker could have ever done to fix the mess brought on by his mystery box method of trying to tell a story in a 3-movie format without having a writers' room in place this time to cover for him with it.

J.J. Abrams really didn't even bother planning out his Star Wars trilogy but went around telling the cast "understand the scale. This is not a role in a movie. This is a religion for people. It changes things on a level that is inconceivable" and stressing out Daisy Ridley so much with expectations she developed ulcers. God he sucks ass