First of all was making Luke Skywalker the living MacGuffin of The Force Awakens. Without Luke around there was no one to train Rey in the Force or even to provide pointers like Ben Kenobi in A New Hope. So JJ Abrams and company just said she could do all this stuff...because...reasons. We'll explain it later!
Oh, wait, except thanks to Rian Johnson we didn't! Also he completely bungled the training. Luke only gives her a couple of half-assed lessons during the movie. Whereas in Empire, Luke has weeks or a month or however long of grueling daily training with Yoda. The only thing they could fall back on was she was just naturally powerful. Basically like Anakin in Phantom Menace only without mention of midichlorians. Which just comes off as lazy.
Another bad decision: Luke doesn't see the light in The Last Jedi until after Rey and Chewie have left. (Because it takes a ghost to convince him not to let his sister and friends be murdered by the First Order.) Compounding this, dumbass Rian Johnson already showed his X-wing underwater. So, how can he get across the galaxy and save the day? Um...he can beam his consciousness across the galaxy! Yeah, that's it. Just because we've never seen that in any other movie and just because Luke's spent years not using the Force doesn't mean he can't just suddenly manifest a new power no Jedi has ever used before. Deus ex machina much?
Then we get to The Rise of
Though really I think the worst decision was trying to Marvel this shit in the first place by having 3 directors working on it. And compressing the timeline to 2 years when the first six had at least 3 years separation. The Marvel thing works fine to have one person working on Ant-Man and one working on Black Panther and one working on Captain Marvel and then one guy (or two really) working on Endgame to tie it all sort of together. But that doesn't work with a trilogy where each movie is highly dependent on the one before. That's why, as previously stated, they needed a strong, visionary person in charge of the whole thing, not just some bureaucrat. The results speak for themselves. Financially it was a success, but creatively it became a mess.
So the moral of the story is that typically when something goes wrong it's not just because of one thing. There's a whole chain of failure. When you're editing especially and something just isn't working out, start looking backwards until you find where the trouble began. Chances are it's something near the beginning. Just don't try to half-assed paper over it like a little kid trying to hide a mess. Maybe big Hollywood directors can get away with that, but you can't. If you think no one will notice, trust me, someone will give you a bad review saying exactly that.
2 comments:
At work, we call this behavior, "Circling the drain." So yeah, bad decisions usually beget bad decisions. I've enjoyed watching you dissect what's wrong with these Star Wars films. My observations are on a different (yet oddly similar in some aspects) vein. Some of them are questions like: Why is the Force so much more powerful in these Disney movies? It feels like Disney is embracing wholeheartedly the idea that The Force is just a kind of magic or sorcery and their kind of taking the "god" approach to it kinda like what you see in the Maleficent movies. I mean...Maleficent is just a fairie but the kind of magical power she demonstrates is basically god-like. The similarities between Maleficent and Star Wars seem intentional. I wonder if its simply that audiences have changed. People are no longer happy with watch Palpatine hurl a single senate platform at Yoda only to have him stop it with the Force. Now they want to see Palpatine electrify the entire sky as far as the eye can see with his Force Lightning powers (which honestly didn't look like it took much effort). He might as well have been flicking crumbs off his robe. The same with Rey catching a ship with The Force. I mean...she looked as strained as a person doing some squat thrusts, but that's it.
Yeah there are a number of bad decisions that led to Star Wars scaling back plans. It cod have worked if the solo movies had been better received.ike to said this would have given audiences a break in tone and story. Otherwise it's just bad news after another. Hopefully they're new found caution will lead them down the right path.
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