I haven't seen his TROS video. Kind of how you arrived at TROS is shit without seeing it . I've watched his TLJ and TFA videos.

 

I've formed an opinion based on what I've seen and reviews of the script. I did not see the movie so I am making no claims on how enjoyable it is as a viewing experience.

 

Guys, no one cares. Stop the derail, please.

 

(Snipping the rest since it's either been addressed by others, or I basically agree with it)

I don't think I'd call the Marvelfication of Star Wars an entirely bad thing, considering the Marvel movies succeed largely because they combine Disney's budget and resources with a consistently solid narrative structure. When most of my issues with the new Star Wars trilogy stems from a very poorly laid narrative structure where they're obviously making things up as they go... Well if the new trilogy had set up Palpatine's return as well as the MCU set up Thanos, I'd be a lot happier with the movies.

As for the comparison to the prequels ... really I think they make an interesting study in contrasts. The prequels zigged in most of the places that the sequels zagged. I think that the prequels worked better as a whole unit because even if Lucas's directing and dialogue left a lot to be desired, Lucas kept the trilogy running on a very strong narrative foundation.

That said, the new trilogy works a lot better as individual movies. The biggest problem with TFA is that a lot of the things it sets up don't get paid off well in future films. The biggest problem with TLJ is that it really doesn't mesh well with the movies that came before and after it. The biggest problem with TRoS is how much screentime it spends on things that really should've been set up in previous movies.

As for the broader Star Wars brand, it's pretty clear that Disney's working to address what damage its taken. TLJ showed some of the cracks in poor brand management that became a lot harder to deny with Solo and TRoS. However, Disney's also smart enough to notice the issue, and take measures to address it. One of the virtues of the Disney model of constantly producing content is that it makes it a lot easier to shake off any individual installments that flop. Sure, Solo bombed and TRoS is below expectations, but look at all the other stuff that just came out or will be coming out soon.

 

Pretty much. The people saying it's dead wouldn't have been out of place a decade and a half ago. And while I agree there's a good story somewhere in the PT and that I enjoy it (I mean I wrote HP/SW crossover fics with the worst SW movie ), people really forget how despised those movies were.

I think there's a level of dishonesty from most people who forget just how TPM and AOTC were received. And how quickly they came around when ROTS wasn't a complete dumpster fire. That was three years after this trainwreck:

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It's why I don't put too much stock in the notion that TLJ somehow killed the fandom and made TROS fail. You could maybe account for the lower opening being TLJ's fault if you wanted to, but ultimately TROS was as poorly reviewed as AOTC and TPM and had the lowest Cinemascore of all PT and ST movies. TROS would've done TLJ numbers if it was a great movie. As it is, it isn't and so it'll do a little over a billion - which I think is generous considering the quality dip from TFA and TLJ.

There were story beats for TROS to explore off of TLJ to make the three a cohesive story. There are great writers who could've made a fan-pleasing film that disregarded TLJ. Disney decided they wanted to do the passive progressive nostalgia trip and course correction. But they also unfortunately hired J.J. Abrams and Chris Terrio.

Part of the Marvelification is the rapid in the pipeline cookie cutter stories, which SW is already sort of suffering from. A movie every year is just yikes. That's just not SW and I'm hopeful we won't see an increase in it with an effort to do a cinematic universe and tie-ins between characters from different films into some rando finale.

It's a refusal to allow a bit more daring. I think we can see that with Scott Derrickson "dropping out" from Multiverse of Madness. I think it's a fair guess he wanted to push the envelope and Marvel was like nah.

Hopefully with the sacred cow of the OT done breathing down their back, we can get some films that delve beyond it.

 

I think part of it is also just the nature of these sorts of discussions, and people's tendency to push binary interpretations. It can't be a movie with some problems and some positives, it's either the worst thing ever or a flawless work of genius. Early on in the conversation it was all about the prequels' flaws, so the inevitable pushback focused a lot on the positive.

Also, like I mentioned before, the prequels are very different movies from the sequels. A lot of what was bad in the prequels got done right in the sequels, and vice versa. For someone like me who's very annoyed at the lack of a strong narrative structure in the sequels, it's hard not to notice that the prequels were a lot better on that front.

Additionally, Lucas made movies that were very much not safe corporate projects. His filmography has a lot of examples of why constantly being weird and different is does not necessarily lead to good movies. But seeing Star Wars go in that safe corporate direction does make it feel like it's lost something of what made it special before.

I think a lot of the argument behind that is based on the idea that Johnson somehow deviated from the plan with some of his more subversive choices on TLJ. However, that assumes that there ever was a plan in the first place. All indications are that Disney was writing by the seat of their pants throughout the trilogy, which is part of why TRoS was the most poorly received, as it was the most dependent on being set up by previous films and paying off the promises made by earlier installments.

Yeah, while I can completely understand the reasoning behind bringing back the OT characters, especially since this was the last chance they'd get to put the original cast back together, doing a 40 years later sequel comes with a whole lot of baggage. Especially when Return of the Jedi already wrapped up the Skywalker story in a very satisfying way.

Really, I think if you wanted to a sequel to the OT, it would've been better to go in a completely new direction rather than having Palpatine go write the OT off as "All going according to my grand plan." From the sound of it that's what Lucas wanted to do, but Disney was understandably wary of going with a really off-the-wall concept when they'd just spent billions on the IP and Lucas's reputation was very tarnished at the time.

 

One of the biggest problems with this film and the sequel trilogy as a whole is that it lacks identity. The original trilogy and the prequel trilogy, in spite of all of its faults and shortcomings, had clear and cohesion narrative progression and thematic underpinnings.

With this latest film and reflecting back on The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi, the opposite could not be more true. There are entire plotlines introduced and forgotten, some even within the span of a single movie. (For case in point of the latter: Consider Finn's attempted confession to Rey on the verge of what they believed to be death, something not touched upon again in the film at all) The trilogy seems caught within the shadow of the original trilogy, resurrecting storylines, motifs, and in this latest film, even once long dead characters, all without anything seemingly new or novel to say or portray. The films lack their own two legs to stand upon, either narratively or thematically.

(For all of its issues, I will give The Last Jedi some credit in seeming to try to push the series into a novel direction, even if the film suffers issues both internally and its issues in the light of a follow up to The Force Awakens or in the broader context of Star Wars as a whole.)

Thematically, the trilogy seems all over the place, and this isn't helped by the apparent lack of coordination and planning across the trilogy. As I was watching the final scene of The Rise of Skywalker, I asked myself, "What was this all for? What was this all about?" And where answers readily supplied themselves for the original trilogy and the prequel trilogy, I couldn't find anything in this sequel trilogy like that. The special effects were excellent, there were dramatic moments and reveals, but the question as to what this was all for beyond some fictional drama happening punctuated with bombast and explosions escaped me.

There are lots of elements within individual scenes and in The Last Jedi perhaps even approaching something meaningful or important to say, but taken as a whole, my takeaway from the sequel trilogy has been, in the words of a far greater writer than either Abrams or Johnson, "sound and fury signifying nothing."