The Turd Sandwich Trilogy

(cont.)

2. The theme of holding on to the past for the sake of the symbol, not for the essence of what is important. This got watered down again, but here's my take: Kylo Ren's philosophy is to burn the past and start again. He's wrong: you shouldn't forget the past, you should learn from it and respect those who have gone before, but not revere every detail for its own sake. I like this a lot. Luke's wisdom (a rare moment in The Last Jedi) is solid. He tells Rey, "Don't worry about the *Jedi*, worry about the *Force*," and that's a beautiful message. But...

...again, it's spoiled by the script. Last Jedi presents this theme, not as Luke's wisdom, but as, "ignore the past (old Star Wars movies, Gen X, Baby Boomers), and go get 'em Millennials!" It's just a mess because the script can't stick to decent charactisation for half the people we're watching, it's just shoehorning messages in without a clear focus.

At the end of the film, I'm not sure exactly what Johnson's going for with this one. He seems to be trying to undercut the previous films' characters and moral stances, but not Leia. He wants us to think Luke failed, but doesn't give a reason for Luke to spend ten years in exile - not really (I don't by, "it seems to be what Jedi do", because that's a character/plot problem that falls in the lap of the prequels - not the original mythologies). So, again: I like the theme, but the film mishandles it.

(cont.)

3. Grey morals throughout the film seemed to be adding interesting new tones to the previously black-and-white Star Wars universe. Is Kylo going to be good or bad? What about Rey? The arms dealers on Canto Bight are tainting the Rebels by association...somehow...

...and it starts to fall apart again. The Throne Room scene is my favourite scene in this film. I didn't know who was going to turn who, what was going to happen. I loved the idea of Ren and Rey banding together to neither support the regime of the First Order OR prop up the ineffectual Republic - putting them as kind ambiguously (im)moral people. But, of course, that didn't happen. There were no consequences to that scene, and that ending was a severe misstep.

The arms dealer thing was especially weird. Johnson seemed to be trying to make a point about how everybody's buying weapons, so they're all bad! Except I keep thinking about the original films. The Good Guys weren't bad. They just weren't. And buying a weapon to defend the weak from oppression is not the same as buying a weapon to oppress people, no matter if you bought it from the same person or not.

Canto Bight was a whole other movie's worth of sub-plots and material crammed in. It bogged down the Last Jedi and didn't have time to dig into its themes and morals properly, so the whole thing fell flat and made Finn and Rose's arc worthless. Another good theme down the drain.

(cont.)

So, how does all of this failure (ironically) add up to a potentially-great third film?

Well, if J.J. Abrams takes this bedrock and cashes in, it would work.

1. He has to reconcile the Failures with the Successes. These storylines could weave together to show how success becomes failure and vice-versa. If J.J. presents us with a no-win scenario set up by The Last Jedi, where the heroes have to pick the lesser of two evils, that could be a great place to push these movies into, and would force the characters to deal with some heavy consequences. Notably, the Throne Room scene has to pay off. Maybe the suggestions seeded into Rey and Ren will germinate into them (finally) switching sides. The possibilities are endless. J.J. just needs to pick a great one.

2. He has to bring the sins and glories of the past together with the hope and uncertainty of the future to make this one continual arc instead of just about leaving behind the Baby Boomer heroes to tell the new stories.

3. He has to make the Canto Bight stuff pay off. If the "real" villains in Episode IX, for instance, are the arms dealers, that would be cool. If they are these secret warmongers who supplied the First Order with ships and weapons (explaining how they build Starkiller Base in the process) just to keep war (and profit) going? That's a really great plot twist and a villain we haven't seen in Star Wars: corrupted commerce.

I'm ignoring a lot of detail that I didn't like in The Last Jedi (and Force Awakens), but I'm just trying to stick to the big stuff.

There was so much set up in TLJ that a third film can build on it, cap off those storylines, and make everything satisfying. It would be a Herculean task, but it's not impossible. This would be a "never tell me the odds" situation.

The reality is that they probably won't do it. But, I think the sequel trilogy put some pretty big misfires into The Force Awakens alone (how did the First Order get their weapons? how did Han *lose* the Millennium Falcon!?) and that means they probably can't salvage it. But the third film *might* pull it off.

Ultimately, I feel like Star Wars was such a monumental thing that it was impossible to follow up Return of the Jedi. You can't do it and please everybody, which means the cracks in the storytelling will cause the whole thing to collapse. But it still stings because there was so much potential in these films. The prequels wasted the opportunity to show the fall of a Republic mirrored/analogised through the Fall of a soul. The sequels are wasting the opportunity to expand the universe and tell further stories of the characters.

At some point, it became more about just making more Star Wars for the sake of itself, not telling a good story. The first three films put story and character first, and that's how they work. The prequels AND sequels are putting "Star Wars" (whatever that means) first and that's why they're failing to recapture the magic.

Sorry. That was a lot of gassing on. What can I say? I love film, and I love Star Wars, and I love talking about it.