Bad Scriptwriting Advice From Rian Johnson

Thanks to this post on The Geek Twins, here's some bad scriptwriting advice from The Last Jedi director Rian Johnson about not giving Snoke any background during the throne room scenes with Rey:

At a Q&A for the BAFTA awards, writer/director Rian Johnson explained why he didn't explore the character's backstory.
"In this particular story, it’s much more like the original trilogy, where with Snoke if you think about the actual scenes, if suddenly I had paused one of the scenes to give a 30-second monologue about who he was, it would have kind of stopped the scene in its tracks, I realized," Johnson told the crowd.

This was pretty disingenuous.  No one was asking him to pause the scene to give a 30-second monologue.  If Johnson really thinks that then he definitely shouldn't have been allowed anywhere near a Star Wars script.  Or any script for that matter.

All you have to do is leave a clue as to where Snoke came from.  Though my comment didn't post on that site (probably my phone being shite) in about two minutes I came up with two easy ways to insert something in the dialog.

1. Have Snoke say to Rey:  You think you can resist me?  My power came from...wherever
2. Have Snoke say to Rey:  You thought Skywalker could teach you to beat me?  I learned from...whoever

See, it's that fucking easy.  Maybe you want to be a little more subtle, not that Star Wars movies really need to be.  But neither is stopping the scene for a 30-second monologue.  Any scriptwriter worth a damn should know how to do that.

Some people say, Why do we even need to know where Snoke came from?  No one said where the Emperor came from until the prequels.  (Or the Expanded Universe novels/comics really.)  But it doesn't make sense that someone who looks as old as Snoke does could exist with the power he has.  Palpatine was no fool; anyone with dark side power like his would either have to serve him (Darths Maul, Tyrannus, Vader) or they'd be dead.  Yoda and Obi-Wan managed to hide for a while, though it was speculated in one of the earlier Expanded Universe novels that Yoda could hide because he was so close to the dark side cave on Dagobah.  I'm not sure what Obi-Wan's excuse was.

Maybe for Rey at that moment it wasn't a big deal but for the Star Wars universe in general it's kind of an important question.  And not one you should just hope someone else will answer in the next movie or in a novel or comic later.  If you don't know where Snoke came from, I guess it explains why you thought he was expendable enough to be killed so easily.

For writers then I guess the moral is to know your characters and their motivations, even if it's a character someone else created.  And you can subtly insert bits of background here and there.  You don't need to stop everything to dump it on people all at once.

You'll be relieved to know that this is the last post in my one-sided war against Rian Johnson for The Last Jedi.  For now...