Star Wars: The Last Jedi is ridiculed for dismissing the groundwork of The Force Awakens, but it’s a great sequel that continues the story properly. Here’s why.
I’m on board with this article. If there was, as is famously repeated online, “no plan,” then JJ should have conceded that Rian is a better writer and carried his threads forward.
If TFA were a shot for shot remake it might have actually not been that bad…
I. The hero is overpowered from the get go. Rey can fly the millennium falcon by herself… and she’s able to use the force AND beat a Sith already from the first movie! …it would have actually been better if they had taken notes from the 1st duel between Luke and Vader…
II. Kilo is shown to be childishly immature, insecure, whiny and prone to make very obvious mistakes… he’s obsessed with Vader, but he’s nothing like Vader… he’s so emotion-driven that it ends up being a very superficial character that just throws tantrums.
III. Poor attempts at shock value. You could see Han’s death from a mile away… but worse, it had very little real emotional weight. It came off very unconvincing… specially since we are shown how it was Leia the one who was pushing Han to try to save his son, Han didn’t actually believe in him to begin with. They really did him dirty with such a cheap death. No comparison with Ben’s death on ANH.
IV. Too many superfluous characters… I don’t remember ANH having this much filler stuff. We didn’t need so many parallel stories being told at the same time slowing down the flow. ANH delivered a lot of world building without having to make long expositions.
V. Open ending without a satisfying conclusion. ANH would have worked well even if it were a single movie instead of a trilogy. The death star blowing up is a very satisfying end. TFA climax is just Rey finding Luke. It’s almost as if the whole movie was just setup for whatever comes next without having a good idea of what should come next but leaving a lot of poorly developed characters, with a lot more restrictions and subplots than ANH had, all built up in a Universe that was a lot less interesting than it could have been if we simply started straight from the beginnings of the New Republic that Ep6 had set up…
It’s almost as if they were trying to make a remake without really understanding what was that made the original great.
I might have to rewatch TFA to remember more problems with it… but I don’t think there was a single difference vs ANH that I liked. Not only was it unoriginal, it was bad at the things that it did different and it set up a very shaky ground for any follow up movie… imho, TLJ did good by destroying some of the weak and uninteresting macguffins and opening it up back again to uncharted territory, and at least when it tries to shock it does shock. Even if it also has many flaws in and on itself. After that, ep9 had a lot of freedom and it would have been able to go in a lot of directions without having to mess up with anything… but no, they managed to somehow still find ways to mess it up.
You’re pretty right on all accounts. I meant it in the fairly literal sense of “introduced to orphan main character on desert planet, go to rebel base on lush green planet, then fight planet destroying superstation controlled by the empire” oh and maybe there’s a frog-like mentor character?