#tldr i thought tlj was gr9 but it had buckets of issues and was probably a production nightmare

[theseerasures]

Top 5 changes you’d make for TLJ

let it be known that i tried FOR DAYS to make this into a coherent list rather than a disjointed series of essays (ironic given the movie i’m talking about) but you know what!! i’m gonna play this by ear and release responses by parts.

i feel like it’s maybe important for me to preface this for the general audience with the fact that i did, overall, love The Last Jedi. the reasons why have to do mostly with who i am as a person, and while i’d be happy to expound on the general differences between what i find interesting vs. what is good vs. what is socially responsible, this isn’t really the place for it. there is a LOT to criticize in the movie tho, so let’s get started with

ONE: From my point of view, the Jedi are evil!!!

this one is about Rian Johnson.

or more specifically, it’s about Rian Johnson vs. JJ Abrams as storytellers. this video touches on some of what i’m going to be talking about, but to be perfectly honest i find its explanation of ~potential vs. kinetic energy in filmmaking~ unsatisfying and unnecessarily pretentious. i don’t think the issue has to do with how Rian and JJ tell their stories at all, but what kinds of stories they’re interested in telling in the first place.

that video was right when it came to JJ–his primary focus as a writer is on the mystery box. more broadly, JJ is interested in actualizing the genre concept so that a story could revolve around it. Lost was ABOUT its own genre: being trapped on a mysterious, magical island that only gets more mysterious and magical propels the conflict. Alias was ABOUT spies in much the same way–the show was at its best when it was about aliases. this is not to say that his characters are bland or even secondary to the plot, but you do get the sense that they were selected because of how they’d react to the central situation–Jack is a man of science, Locke is a man of faith, they react to the mysteries of the island in divergent ways, so on and so forth.

this all sounds dumb and basic–like of course a genre guy would use genre to service the story–but what sets JJ apart is that he’s really good at reviving the potential of specific concepts and tropes and reminding us why we liked them in the first place. the success of his stories tend to rely on some metafictional baggage, on justifying why something was able to capture the zeitgeist. this is what makes him an appealing rebooter. the reason TFA was so great was the Star-Wars-ness of it all; not just invoking iconography like Masked Evil Dude with a Secret and the Death Star, but using that stuff to drive the plot in a way that we hadn’t seen before and reinforcing that there’s still untapped potential in the old story structures. the characters he introduced were, similarly, people who would act and react in interesting ways to a Star War: Poe embedded deep in the Resistance, Finn unwillingly falling into rebellion, Rey finding her place in a mystical destiny, etc etc. it’s all a remix, but it was a damn good one, and it reminded people why they loved Star Wars in the first place.

the problem with bringing in Rian Johnson as the followup act to JJ Abrams is that Rian Johnson doesn’t really give a shit about any of that.

it’s not that he’s incapable of letting ideas and plot issues simmer, it’s that i think Rian Johnson is at his core an ideas guy–his movies tend to be about archetypes and ideologies coming into conflict, about older ideas being torn open and examined and (only sometimes) rebuilt. he’s certainly capable of writing effective characters and dialogue, but on the whole that stuff is in service to exploring some kind of philosophical issue or idea. characters Stand for something in Rian Johnson movies–not in the sense that they have certain convictions that they hold tightly to, but in that they are often embodied by those convictions. his approach to genre works in much the same way; they’re helpful tools to explore certain ideas, but they don’t usually form the core of the narrative itself.

this makes him GREAT for Star Wars in one way but horrible for TLJ in a different way. on the one hand, this ‘verse has been replete with the kind of binaries that Rian loves to poke at: Light and Dark, order and rebellion, etc. on the other hand, his kind of hyper-scrutiny on Societal Norms or Western Thought or whatever else works best in a very controlled environment. Looper, for example, worked great in its discussion of selfishness/selflessness, fate/free will because the movie was a tiny beaker where two of the three leads literally played different iterations of the same character. TLJ worked substantially LESS well because–well, it’s a fucking sequel in a sequel trilogy that relies on affirming some of the meta-baggage the franchise has been carrying around for literal decades.

this is why the movie not only glossed over and shelved a lot of pre-existing questions and issues that we wanted to see more of, but also gave us a lot of padding that felt kind of unnecessary. Rian Johnson is fundamentally uninterested in franchise-related questions like what the fuck happened with Snoke and Ben or where the fuck are the Knights of Ren or where the fuck does Phasma disappear to for 4/5ths of every film; his main interest in making this movie were a series of philosophical issues dealing with historiography, personal/political stakes, and the methodology of war. to do that he had to introduce new conflicts, create new characters to an already bloated cast so they can act as ideological foils to our heroes, and (in one case) make kind of baffling assumptions about how pre-existing characters had developed offscreen. this is not to say that the ideas themselves were boring and the movie was wholly bad, but a lot of interesting ideas were very shoddily packaged as we alternated between feeling like really important stuff just kind of zipped by and being bored by all the NEW pipe that Rian wanted to lay so he could get to whatever ideological showdown he wanted to have.

so, yeah: i think Rian Johnson could do a lot of cool things in this franchise and am glad he’s doing the new trilogy where he can navel-gaze to his heart’s content, but i don’t think he was a very consistent following act for JJ Abrams (or honestly, for any part of the Star Wars sequel reunion tour). nix him, and if you can’t bring back JJ or Lawrence Kasdan, then at least bring in a seasoned franchise guy who’s willing to work with more of the pre-existing material.

(probably Justin Lin tbh)