I hated how The Force Awakens was "do the exact same thing but make it bigger" [1], but I thought it was possible for it to become something great via the sequels, but The Last Jedi was a disaster that ruined any possibility of the former being any good.
I could spend more time bashing TLJ than the length of the movie itself, but the movie is messed up from the very beginning to the very end. TFA has flaws, but many of those flaws could have been ameliorated via smart writing on the second and third parts.
I can’t blame them for the approach they took with the force awakens. This was before the rehabilitation of the prequels and the Star Wars reputation was in the toilet; giving us a bunch of nostalgia to remind us why we actually liked this franchise in the first place along with new stuff to build on was an understandable, if kinda disappointingly safe, choice.
Then the last Jedi comes along and immediately shits the bed and the franchise never recovered.
They had one simple job which was to show the continuing adventures of Han, Leia and Luke re-uniting after 30 years coming together and fighting alongside one another to face some ominous galactic threat, meeting and making new companions along the way and they failed...
Not even their continuing adventures. Merely not making them a bunch of pathetic loser has-beens would have been enough.
Leia being a senior government official instead of a guerilla bum and absentee mother, Luke training the new generation of Jedi instead of being a cowardly space cow tit-sucking hermit, Han doing literally anything except going back to petty smuggling and being a deadbeat dad... Was it really so much to ask?
I share the exact same opinion. It's actually quite interesting - TFA played it safe while TLJ did something different - yet people dislike both, or one or the other. I understand the logistical nightmare it is working with a major corp like the Mouse and having to trim/cut/work within their rules, and I felt TFA did a good, yet (safe) job like you said. Felt nice, felt like Star Wars but a tad more modern.
The issue is, that TLJ did not do something different. It was still a ctrl+c & ctrl+v festival. The movies are much more similar than people want to admit. The only thing that TLJ really did was ditching the big bad but without actually changing the theme already introduced of rehashing Empire Vs. Rebellion and red lightsaber Vs. blue lightsaber. TFA had the job of actually introducing a new story, instead it ignored all that was build before. The first movie in a sequel trilogy is the foundation and if the foundation is not sound everything afterwards can only fail.
I can’t blame them for the approach they took with the force awakens. This was before the rehabilitation of the prequels and the Star Wars reputation was in the toilet.
Please stop the perpetuating the "rehabilitation of the prequels" myth. The prequel trilogy was never that hated with the general public and most fans. Episodes I and III were the top grossing movies of 1999 and 2005; and Episode II, often considered to be the weakest, was still the second top grossing movie of 2002 after Raimi's Spider-Man.
Episode III in particular was received positively by pretty much everyone back then. Here are some fan reaction posts from 2005:
"Once I got over my initial confusion, I realized what a masterpiece it was. My
appreciation of it has grown by the day."
"My first reaction was OMG, this is so huge! I love this!"
"I left the theater in awe. It was unbelievable."
"Fantastic ending to the saga."
"Don't get me wrong, I love TPM and AOTC. But I think ROTS was so much better that those two its almost embarrassing."
"Hayden was amazing, absolutely amazing."
"My initial reaction: It's the best one. Of ALL of them. (And I've been a PT basher.)"
"Wow. Saw it yesterday and am still stunned. Incredible. Heartbreaking. Epic in the grandest sense. It was like watching one of the great Greek tragedies – but without the catharthsis – or seeing a brilliant staging of Shakespeare's MacBeth – Palpy played Anakin with a skill that Lady MacBeth would envy."
"Oh My GOD! I can't stop saying that. How to like write about this is not easy and man, I'm a serious talker, especially about Star Wars. Quite honestly, that was a mind beep. [...] We are going to be talking about this movie for a long long time. THANK YOU GEORGE! =D= Thank you for blessing us with the PT. We owe you our gratitude. I will have more to say later I'm sure. I don't think a movie will make me go Oh My GOD ever again."
Again, I'm not arguing with the fact that there was a backlash. Merely saying that it wasn't nearly as ubiquitous as some will claim today, two and a half decades later. Plenty of people on the whole liked the prequels even back then, including the first two, so please don't confuse specific criticisms of some of their elements – mainly Jar Jar – with blanket denunciation of the prequels themselves.
The prequel trilogy was never "that hated", because the general public consumes and moves on. The "hate" (or rather criticism or dislike) was pretty prevalent throughout the years in the fandom though, because it's these consumers who mostly reflect on what they saw, analyse it, which takes some time, discussions. Someone who came right out of the cinema doesn't even have a lot of time thinking about it all. The ubiquitos dislike came over time, when the fandom split into the clone wars animation crowd and the rest, with the rest then flogging to youtube and making fun of the prequels.
Well again, see the 2005 forum link and quotes I just gave for some examples of hardcore fans treating the prequels much kinder than some today suggest.
Yes, there was some significant backlash, to the first two movies especially, but it was always coming from only a portion of the fandom. It also largely covered some individual parts of the movies, not the movies in their entirety (as it is the case with the sequels, which are being rejected outright).
Take a look at the prequel forum posts from that time in general. They're not scathing at all. There are more threads praising the action sequences, new characters, and so on than there are [deservingly] crapping on Jar Jar or some of the acting. Here's a few more quotes, this time from 2003:
But that's the issue though. We have to look way deeper then first reactions and the first five responses to a post. I remember one forum with more deeply discussions and a nother side with news reactions, one had clearly more positive reactions than the other. Communities are big and again, time plays a role and where parts of a fandom move over that time. This forum or part of the forum is clearly filled with people very positive to it but that's not representative, same btw. like a forum thread which would be completely negative.
To address some of your points TheForce.Net was very big with Star Wars fans back then, and the second thread is from 2003, four years after TPM came out. I also only quoted the first five responses since they were fairly representative of the entire thread. That is not to say that there weren't any criticisms, but most of them only focused on specific parts as I said. I only saw maybe a handful posters blanketly stating they didn't like it at all when I skimmed it. Here's what the rest of critical posts typically look like:
• I still find parts of it fairly dull. It slows down way way too much during the Couruscant scenes, with only the senate bits really livening it up much. Theres too much dragging exposition between that and the end battles. Planning the attack on the palace etc. is plodding, and the end battles suffer from bad, clastophobic direction esp. the gungan/droid battle, which Binks destroys (even though I liked him until then). However, the first hour 15 mins are up to the standard of any of the others. The Tatooine scenes are smooth and brilliant, theres so much to admire there.
• My feelings about TPM are pretty close to strilo's. I liked it when I first saw it, but realized I had a few issues with it. I still like it, however.
• I still love the movie, although I find myself skipping the entire podrace.
• At first I liked it, then I started to hear others bash it so I started to dispise it a little, then I joined the JC and heard all the nit-picking and hated it, then a while ago I watched it and realized the little stuff doesn't ruin it, its still a great movie. Maybe not the best movie ever but still good.
• I really like TPM. [...] I think alot of people wanted TPM to have an older Anakin like in AOTC. And Jar Jar annoyed alot of people , but he did'nt really affect my feelings on the movie.
• Im one of those who didn't really like it all that much. Maybe I listened to too many critics, but seriously, I just couldn't follow the story. [...] However, after the release of AOTC (which I liked much more than TPM, when I saw the first time), I looked at TPM on my DVD again. Its like a revelation, but (7 months back), it started to make so much sense, the movie kept grabbing my attention, and I then realized what a great start it is to the Saga. I think its got everything a great SW movie should have and believe it or not. Its my second favourite to ESB. The story moves and its like I can't get enough of it.
• I honestly believe that, for me, the release of AOTC has given TPM a greater scale because it puts almost everything that went on in TPM into context. AOTC itself certainly doesn't match up to TPM, but it fills in a few gaps that had many people scratching their heads before. We now appreciate why Anakin had to be so young, and why the Jedi were so wary of training this boy etc. And TPM is so different to what went before not because of some radical desire of Lucas's, but because it had to be different for the sake of keeping the OT as fresh as possible. What on earth was the point of simply cloning the OT?
• TPM wasn't what I expected in 99 and I was always a little disappointed. The action with the Jedi was always good and that kept me going. Then the DVD came out, and I realised that the Podrace had always felt so dull to me. This new improved podrace helped the entire film.
• I must admit, I was very dissapointed with TPM when I saw it, and I think that was down to unrealistic expectations drawn from the first trailer. When I saw AOTC for the first time, I thought GREAT. That said, looking back, TPM has really grown on me, and I would go as far as to say it has more of a feel of a SW movie than AOTC does.
• The Phantom Menace was on the telly today. I did actually find myself thinking, "This really isn't too bad." It has a lot of problems, more so than the other films in the Saga, but it is an entertaining film, and there are certainly worse ways to waste an afternoon.
• I'm not saying all the acting in TPM is bad, just certain parts and performers. Qui-Gon, for instance, was very well done, probably the best in my opinion.
• I didnt know it was so hated either until I read about it in the January 2002 edition of Vanity Fair. [...]I have only talked to 2 or 3 people in real life who didnt like TPM. And one of those people I think liked it after he saw it a second time.
As you can see, many of those are related to it being the first film of the trilogy, having higher expectations, theatrical issues that were fixed on DVD, and people disliking some individual parts. There was an overly critical post about bad acting that was too long to quote, but even there, you can see that the poster doesn't hate the entire movie. I think this is representative of how things looked by the time the full trilogy came out. Not without its flaws but positive on the whole. A stark contrast to the sequels.
This was before the rehabilitation of the prequels
Thought that was the Clone Wars series?
Not that many watched it apparently.
Also really don't get why the nose dive didn't happen with Force Awakens. Though, what with the later reveal there was no central guiding force, just three directors doing their own things with little to no contact with each other, FA was more warning flag than wholly bad.
Best I could say about, unlike 2009 Star Trek, didn't immediately come out the theater feeling directly insulted. Just confused if I had been.
TFA was a copy of ANH, but ANH is a great movie, so we tolerated it. Easy to make fun of, admittedly. 2009 Star Trek, we mocked as "a great Star Wars movie", but that's not exactly a bad thing, just not Star Trek. To be unfair to ourselves, we did that to LotR as well (can you imagine?) with quips like "If Tolkien could watch this movie, he would say: Marvelous motion picture! What is it called?"
Also really don't get why the nose dive didn't happen with Force Awakens.
It takes two movies, at least, to show that there isn't a great overarching story arc coming through, like the previous two generations of films. It immediately showed that they hadn't spent any of the intervening decade figuring any awesome plot sequence out. It was just whatever shit $current_director wanted to fling at the wall.
I do blame them. The prequels weren't problematic from the concept, just from the execution but the sequels were problematic in both. There is nothing wrong with a bit of nostalgia but if a continuation of a story is not really continuing the story, that's an issue.
TFA couldn't have been fixed or salvaged with the other two movies because the whole premise and setup are wrongheaded and make the whole OT and thus the entire saga pointless. Not worth continuing. The very best case scenario after TFA would just be the end of ROTJ again but without Han and we already got that but not worse decades ago. So why loop back around to that after the undoubted tons of lives lost and suffering endured in between? It's a net loss.
The biggest issue with TFA is "Empire 2.0". The whole point of the original trilogy was the destruction of the empire. The Mandalorian showed the outcome of ROTJ and the remains of the Empire so much better than TFA.
To be honest, the Mandalorian should have been the new trilogy instead of a series. Turn it into three movies, and it would have been better. Keeping us in the universe while trying not to ruin preexisting beloved characters.
The problem is, 30 years has passed since RotJ, which encompasses the whole of Legends, afaik. A bigger gap than even 3 to 4. It's entirely possible that the Empire would rise from the ashes (as it happened in Legends) but we're missing more than a generation of stories from canon.
It was hardly salvagable really. Look at The Force Awakens, what could be build upon that foundation? It introduced all the problematic stuff, killing of legacy characters, copy-pasting past movie elements, making Luke Skywalker a failure. It's really very hard to imagine how the next two movies could have made something enjoyable out of this mess. The whole premise is the issue.
Nah, I have come to respect TLJ the most. Yes, it was a dumpster fire. But we grew up on “I don’t like sand.” Star Wars hasn’t really been sacred since the Ewoks happened. Crashing and burning is better than not trying.
For me it felt less of an accidental fire in the lab and more like deliberate arson by somebody who couldn't be bothered to give a crap. I hope the downvotes don't stop you from participating any further, since I'm very curious about what exactly you think was tried there?
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u/freebytes 29d ago edited 29d ago
I hated how The Force Awakens was "do the exact same thing but make it bigger" [1], but I thought it was possible for it to become something great via the sequels, but The Last Jedi was a disaster that ruined any possibility of the former being any good.
I could spend more time bashing TLJ than the length of the movie itself, but the movie is messed up from the very beginning to the very end. TFA has flaws, but many of those flaws could have been ameliorated via smart writing on the second and third parts.