A Spirited 15 Rounds ...

[wdisney9000]

This has been debunked over and over, but no one wants to listen.

I personally, along with many who were not happy with it, didn't give a rat (or mouse) behind what the answers to the two central mysteries portrayed in TFA were (both in the film, and all the publicity surrounding it, all engineered by Disney and certainly not invented by fans, like some like to pretend). I didn't care if any crazy theory was correct, I just wanted answers that made sense based on the film that came before. That is not a tall order.

TLJ did the one thing that could irritate the heck out of us - it dismissed the questions entirely, and reduced TFA to one great big nonsensical Mary Sue mess. It's not about wanting our preferred version of events, it was about not expecting a film who's events and reveals made no sense in terms of the entire film that proceeded it.

On it's own, TLJ isn't a bad film. As a sequel to TFA, it completely missed the mark, spat upon it, and then stomped up and down on it for good measure.

The two biggest questions most people had after seeing TFA was who is Rey and who is Snoke. Lets pretend they answered both of the questions in TLJ. They could have easily had Luke tell her and then included a short scene showing her past. Same with Snoke. So my question is, why didnt they? I personally do not feel it was a lack of storytelling. I think it was for a reason. The plot in Empire and Return of the Jedi were very simple and easy to follow. I think they realized that they could not make it as simple this time. Look how many people criticized TFA for being "too much like Episode 4". Episode 5 (Empire) answered pretty much all the questions posed by episode 4. They simply didnt do that this time.

Do you not think they will wrap it all up in Episode 9 and answer all the questions? And perhaps even add in a twist?

 

[NearTheEars]

In case the TLJ discussion is boring you, it appears John Skipper lied about having a substance abuse problem and it was a cover for sexual misconduct at ESPN.
https://www.outkickthecoverage.com/...legedly-drinking-dan-lebatard-north-carolina/

Wow, this writer is incredibly full of himself.

“I actually decided not to write that story just before Christmas because I felt like it was spiking the football on ESPN and John Skipper. Outkick has so dominated ESPN over the past year that I felt like I should just hand the football to the official after we scored yet another touchdown.”

I’m a pretty big sports fan and I’ve never even heard of Outkick

 

[NearTheEars]

The two biggest questions most people had after seeing TFA was who is Rey and who is Snoke. Lets pretend they answered both of the questions in TLJ. They could have easily had Luke tell her and then included a short scene showing her past. Same with Snoke. So my question is, why didnt they? I personally do not feel it was a lack of storytelling. I think it was for a reason. The plot in Empire and Return of the Jedi were very simple and easy to follow. I think they realized that they could not make it as simple this time. Look how many people criticized TFA for being "too much like Episode 4". Episode 5 (Empire) answered pretty much all the questions posed by episode 4. They simply didnt do that this time.

Do you not think they will wrap it all up in Episode 9 and answer all the questions? And perhaps even add in a twist?

I don’t know why everyone is crying for backstories all of a sudden. A New Hope did just fine and all you knew about the bad guys was that they were bad guys.

In Empire, do you think that Luke himself needed a cutaway sequence as well in the minutes after Darth revealed that he was his father to clear up the backstory. Sure years later we got the prequels to help clear that up, but originally we just have Darth uttering the phrase and that’s it.

 

[Travel Junkie]

TLJ did the one thing that could irritate the heck out of us - it dismissed the questions entirely, and reduced TFA to one great big nonsensical Mary Sue mess. It's not about wanting our preferred version of events, it was about not expecting a film who's events and reveals made no sense in terms of the entire film that proceeded it.

On it's own, TLJ isn't a bad film. As a sequel to TFA, it completely missed the mark, spat upon it, and then stomped up and down on it for good measure.

Episode VIII was put in a very difficult position. It was tasked with addressing a lot of new questions that were brought up along with continuing left overs from other parts of the saga. As the first in a new saga TFA introduced a lot and answered very little. Many of the new elements TFA brought up did not work for one reason or another and without spoilers, they were addressed in TLJ.

Episode VIII was ambitious in that it tried to address questions in TFA, carry on storylines from 40 years ago while meshing it with new characters, and introduce new ideas. All while trying to keep the studio happy. It can't be understated how difficult a task that is. It's failure was it tried to address too much and as a result was too plot heavy. It should have focused on a few select questions and led the others to be tacked in another film.

It didn't dismiss TFA. It wrapped some of the sloppiness and widened the scope of the saga that will allow it to go in all sorts of new directions. It pared down many of the story elements that were getting out of control. By the way JJ Abrams went out of his way to praise the script that supposedly spat on his film. He has been put in a desirable position. He opened the saga and could raise all the questions he wanted and then he gets to direct episode IX and not have to deal with many of the problems his first Star Wars film had.

 

[lazyboy97o]

I don’t know why everyone is crying for backstories all of a sudden. A New Hope did just fine and all you knew about the bad guys was that they were bad guys.

In Empire, do you think that Luke himself needed a cutaway sequence as well in the minutes after Darth revealed that he was his father to clear up the backstory. Sure years later we got the prequels to help clear that up, but originally we just have Darth uttering the phrase and that’s it.

Star Wars did not begin with the biggest bad guys having been defeated but then popping back up.

Darth Vader’s reveal wasn’t a drawn out mystery. He said everything you need to know.

 

[wdisney9000]

I don’t know why everyone is crying for backstories all of a sudden. A New Hope did just fine and all you knew about the bad guys was that they were bad guys.

In Empire, do you think that Luke himself needed a cutaway sequence as well in the minutes after Darth revealed that he was his father to clear up the backstory. Sure years later we got the prequels to help clear that up, but originally we just have Darth uttering the phrase and that’s it.

Exactly. Vader simply said, "I am your father" and boom, that was it and people were satisfied. But with Rey, people are upset that that TLJ did not dedicated a significant portion of the movie to her back story. Or Snokes.

 

[the.dreamfinder]

Clip from Shannon Tindle’s (“Kubo and the Two Strings”) cancelled Haunted Mansion special for the Disney Channel.

 

[mimitchi33]

Clip from Shannon Tindle’s (“Kubo and the Two Strings”) cancelled Haunted Mansion special for the Disney Channel.

This looks cute!

 

[AEfx]

Episode VIII was put in a very difficult position. It was tasked with addressing a lot of new questions that were brought up along with continuing left overs from other parts of the saga. As the first in a new saga TFA introduced a lot and answered very little. Many of the new elements TFA brought up did not work for one reason or another and without spoilers, they were addressed in TLJ.

They would have worked just fine with any other explanation one could have thought of. The only reason they went this way was to have a

Spoiler

pot-boiler romance to market

.

Episode VIII was ambitious in that it tried to address questions in TFA, carry on storylines from 40 years ago while meshing it with new characters, and introduce new ideas. All while trying to keep the studio happy. It can't be understated how difficult a task that is. It's failure was it tried to address too much and as a result was too plot heavy. It should have focused on a few select questions and led the others to be tacked in another film.

I dunno what film you watched LOL - TLJ was not "plot heavy" by any stretch of the imagination. It was bloated because it tried to give plotlines to the new characters out of duty, but it was actually extremely light-weight in that regard. You literally could remove every Finn scene from the film and it would be exactly the same, for example. Poe could have been really any other character as well. The laser focus on Rey and Kylo for marketing was the issue, it wasn't about "the new characters" this time, it was about boiling the trilogy down to those two. Which is a mistake, IMO - Star Wars is bigger than two characters and their little relationship.

It didn't dismiss TFA. It wrapped some of the sloppiness and widened the scope of the saga that will allow it to go in all sorts of new directions. It pared down many of the story elements that were getting out of control. By the way JJ Abrams went out of his way to praise the script that supposedly spat on his film. He has been put in a desirable position. He opened the saga and could raise all the questions he wanted and then he gets to direct episode IX and not have to deal with many of the problems his first Star Wars film had.

Don't forget, except for being "executive producer" (which anyone will tell you is an honorific more than anything else) he wasn't going to have a thing to do with the future films. TLJ was already in the can by the time he was coming back for the last film. TFA wasn't sloppy at all UNTIL TLJ said "oh, none of this matters". It is an incredibly nuanced film which is why it is so disappointing that TLJ just dropped everything. Go back. Watch TFA and look at each scene. Really watch the interactions between the characters and the direction. For example,

Spoiler

go watch the scene with Han and Rey in the cockpit when she is recounting her story to him. Look at Harrison Ford's face, not Rey. Watch the emotions that go over him as she tells how she was left on Jakku and how hard her life was. Look at Harrison's entire performance in every scene they are in together. If he doesn't know who Rey is, and she is just some nobody from nowhere, apparently no one told Harrison Ford. Or go back and watch the scene when Kylo finds out that Finn and the droid escaped Jakku. He goes ballistic as soon as he finds out "a girl" was with them. The ENTIRE film points to her being "someone" that matters.

Scene after scene in TFA says one thing. And that thing could have easily been explained a hundred different ways, if they hadn't wanted to turn this into

Spoiler

Twilight in Space

. You are trying to over-complicate this in ways that just are not there.

 

[AEfx]

Exactly. Vader simply said, "I am your father" and boom, that was it and people were satisfied. But with Rey, people are upset that that TLJ did not dedicated a significant portion of the movie to her back story. Or Snokes.

Nope. The constant comparisons to Empire just don't hold up in any way, shape, or form. It's funny...people keep going back to the same two things over and over in defense of TLJ - it's comical at this point. No one can defend the criticisms without saying the same two falsehoods over and over "Well, ESB..." and "you just didn't like how your exact wishes were not fulfilled because whatever crazy theory you had didn't pan out" - both of which are completely incorrect or invalid. It's like a drinking game at this point, although if it was we'd all be really drunk right now because literally every time someone defends what this film did to TFA it boils down to one of these two things.

1) In ESB it was a complete surprise. Star Wars didn't build up any mystery of who Darth Vader was, and in fact, they didn't even decide Darth Vader and Anakin were the same character until well into making ESB. It was a total shock - to everyone, including some of the actors in the scene. There was no marketing campaign built up about it, no stoking of the fires in interview after interview with the director. No one went around in Star Wars looking at Luke like they knew him and made a big deal about it.

2) That said, it didn't need to be any more than a line in this film. No one is saying it needed any significant screen time. I don't know where you get that from. It could have been handled exactly like Vader - boom - but the "boom" was, the entire mystery we built up in TFA was...nothing.

People are trying to over-complicate this by making it sound like it was so difficult or arduous to do. It wasn't. Neither was Snoke - which again, was pushed over and over by Lucasfilm, JJ, et all. People just wanted simple answers after being so built up in the last film, they were not demanding anything else. Answers that would have been easy to provide, and kept TLJ much the same film - well, except for the

Spoiler

teeny-bopper romance

...

 

[NearTheEars]

Clip from Shannon Tindle’s (“Kubo and the Two Strings”) cancelled Haunted Mansion special for the Disney Channel.

Interesting. Didn’t know this was a thing. Is there a story behind why it was scrapped?

 

[AEfx]

Do you not think they will wrap it all up in Episode 9 and answer all the questions? And perhaps even add in a twist?

They really can't, without making this film look really silly and contrived, like it was running in place. Stretching it out like that and what was "revealed" in TLJ being a big "JUST KIDDING!" would be incredibly cheap. They could have just so simply dealt with it, and allowed the series to move on. If it is drawn out into a third film now, after where TLJ went with it (or didn't) - then it was a pretty thin, desperate story to begin with.

Personally, I'm not going to spend the next two years like I spent the last two. They have spent their "have faith" currency with me. Clearly, there was no over-arching plan for this trilogy, Johnson went his own direction, and figured Mr. Hack who was going to direct Episode IX would go his own way. Now that JJ is back in the picture, I'm sure it is a conundrum for them. TBH, I think that's why he stated he regretted leaving, because now he is stuck trying to figure out how to wrap this all up - does he make a sequel to TFA or TLJ - they both seem to take place in different universes, I don't envy his decisions now at all.

He is totally painted into a corner no matter what he does, because while people pretend "no matter what, people would have been divided" that's just not the case. But it is now. People keep pretending that people were attached to a specific "Rey's parents are..." or "Snoke was..." but in reality, many of us were not attached to any specific notion aside from who they were mattered or had some connection to the story. Now that both questions have been dismissed and people are claiming that they don't matter anyway, he very well is in a real position of "danged if he does, danged if he doesn't".

 

[AEfx]

I don’t know why everyone is crying for backstories all of a sudden. A New Hope did just fine and all you knew about the bad guys was that they were bad guys.

And I don't know how anyone can make this statement and not realize that DISNEY, LUCASFILM, and everyone involved in the new trilogy created these questions, made a whole movie about them called TFA, and reinforced this in interview after interview, press conference after press conference, panel after panel, teasing over and over about the significance of Rey's parentage and Snoke's backstory.

They never did that with the original trilogy. The closest they came was Yoda saying "there is another" in ESB, which they decided later to make Leia. Which was an answer. And a rather simple one that was dealt with in a single scene.

It's like the criticism of the prequels, but in reverse. Truthfully, no large amount of people ever asked "Gee, what was Darth Vader like as a little kid and a bratty teenager?" And Lucas spent two films out of three on that stuff answering questions that weren't asked. This time, they intentionally created questions and then decided make the "answers" insignificant and/or non-existent even after creating the questions very intentionally.

It's being willfully obtuse to pretend that this was some demand that fans just created out of whole cloth. TFA was marketed on the backs of these big mysteries. The film was shot and directed in a way to stoke these mysteries. TLJ threw them out, which means either TLJ wasn't a good follow-up to TFA (in spite of what people might think of the film on its own), or that they are cheaply dragging it out for what now has to be a contrived explanation in the next film (which shows a huge lack of direction of the trilogy as a whole if these two things were just ignored for the middle film just to drag them out).

 

[lazyboy97o]

They would have worked just fine with any other explanation one could have thought of. The only reason they went this way was to have a

Spoiler

pot-boiler romance to market

.

I dunno what film you watched LOL - TLJ was not "plot heavy" by any stretch of the imagination. It was bloated because it tried to give plotlines to the new characters out of duty, but it was actually extremely light-weight in that regard. You literally could remove every Finn scene from the film and it would be exactly the same, for example. Poe could have been really any other character as well. The laser focus on Rey and Kylo for marketing was the issue, it wasn't about "the new characters" this time, it was about boiling the trilogy down to those two. Which is a mistake, IMO - Star Wars is bigger than two characters and their little relationship.

Don't forget, except for being "executive producer" (which anyone will tell you is an honorific more than anything else) he wasn't going to have a thing to do with the future films. TLJ was already in the can by the time he was coming back for the last film. TFA wasn't sloppy at all UNTIL TLJ said "oh, none of this matters". It is an incredibly nuanced film which is why it is so disappointing that TLJ just dropped everything. Go back. Watch TFA and look at each scene. Really watch the interactions between the characters and the direction. For example,

Spoiler

go watch the scene with Han and Rey in the cockpit when she is recounting her story to him. Look at Harrison Ford's face, not Rey. Watch the emotions that go over him as she tells how she was left on Jakku and how hard her life was. Look at Harrison's entire performance in every scene they are in together. If he doesn't know who Rey is, and she is just some nobody from nowhere, apparently no one told Harrison Ford. Or go back and watch the scene when Kylo finds out that Finn and the droid escaped Jakku. He goes ballistic as soon as he finds out "a girl" was with them. The ENTIRE film points to her being "someone" that matters.

Scene after scene in TFA says one thing. And that thing could have easily been explained a hundred different ways, if they hadn't wanted to turn this into

Spoiler

Twilight in Space

. You are trying to over-complicate this in ways that just are not there.

They didn’t even need to have actual answers. The notion of significance could have been maintained through this film. There really was no weight to anything that happened in the previous film.

 

[Disneyhead'71]

Kylo lied.

It's what bad guys do.

 

[Travel Junkie]

They would have worked just fine with any other explanation one could have thought of. The only reason they went this way was to have a

Something tells me they didn't go the direction you wanted them to go and thus the anger. I could think of many worse ways to go and one of them was the easy way out which is what most fanboys wanted.

I dunno what film you watched LOL - TLJ was not "plot heavy" by any stretch of the imagination.

Not sure we are talking about the same film. TLJ was almost all plot, which you even in admitted in your next sentence. You just didn't like the plot. You even pointed to problems of TFA that TLJ had to deal with, yet you blame TLJ. You should be blaming TFA for introducing those problems.

Personally, I'm not going to spend the next two years like I spent the last two. They have spent their "have faith" currency with me. Clearly, there was no over-arching plan for this trilogy, Johnson went his own direction, and figured Mr. Hack who was going to direct Episode IX would go his own way. Now that JJ is back in the picture, I'm sure it is a conundrum for them.

You are incorrect. There is story group that guides the direction of the series and all things Star Wars. Just because you didn't like the choices they made doesn't mean it wasn't planned out. Perhaps you have to wait for future films to understand why, but there are reasons they made the choices they did.

TLJ answered some questions, gave a red herring to others (bet on it), and opened up brand new ones.

 

[ChrisFL]

Kylo lied.

It's what bad guys do.

It makes me wonder if there would be such turmoil if Rian Johnson was going to direct the next TWO movies and people might be thinking there's more at play in what happened, instead of switching to yet another director (which wasn't planned to be JJ until very recently)

 

[lazyboy97o]

You are incorrect. There is story group that guides the direction of the series and all things Star Wars. Just because you didn't like the choices they made doesn't mean it wasn't planned out. Perhaps you have to wait for future films to understand why, but there are reasons they made the choices they did.

This isn’t true and has been stated as such by the people making the films.

 

[AEfx]

Something tells me they didn't go the direction you wanted them to go and thus the anger. I could think of many worse ways to go and one of them was the easy way out which is what most fanboys wanted.

Something tells me you haven't actually read or digested anything I or others have said and you are just repeating the same nonsense dismissal over and over.

I'll make it really, really simple, so even if somehow you don't understand what has been said before, you won't have that excuse again:

Everything about TFA pointed to the fact that Rey was someone. Her immediate mastery of everything in the film she did. That the characters knew who she was, but it was she (and the audience) that didn't.

I didn't care who that someone was - there are many possibilities - but saying

Spoiler

that she was no one

is not an answer, it was a cop-out.

Not sure we are talking about the same film. TLJ was almost all plot, which you even in admitted in your next sentence. You just didn't like the plot. You even pointed to problems of TFA that TLJ had to deal with, yet you blame TLJ. You should be blaming TFA for introducing those problems.

Wow. Just wow. So much nonsense there, it's remarkable.

So I should blame TFA, the first movie in the series, for the mistakes made by the second film in following up on them? That has got to be the most backward argument made yet. They weren't problems until TLJ decided to give the first film the middle finger.

But hey, progress - at least you are admitting that the two films do not go well together.

As to plot, you don't seem to understand story structure. You could completely remove Finn's little side quest and the plot of the film doesn't change. The outcome doesn't change. It was filler, not plot - they were stuck with two actors (Boyega and Christie) in "major" roles who didn't have anything to do with the plot of the film. It would have made a good comic book side story companion piece.

You are incorrect. There is story group that guides the direction of the series and all things Star Wars. Just because you didn't like the choices they made doesn't mean it wasn't planned out. Perhaps you have to wait for future films to understand why, but there are reasons they made the choices they did.

TLJ answered some questions, gave a red herring to others (bet on it), and opened up brand new ones.

Oh, that faith you have. It would be admirable if it were not so demonstrably untrue. The directors and writers of the films have actually stated that they are doing the feature film scripts as they go along and that it's up to the next writer to continue to fill in the blanks. In this case, they did a poor job doing that with TLJ - as you stated above, they did not pick up the threads TFA so clearly left. The story group is just responsible for the ancillary media and making sure it all ties in.

I was you two years ago. I had that faith. But TLJ and everything surrounding it has taught me that Disney/Lucasfilm is undeserving of it. If they somehow manage to right the ship at this point, I'll be the first to say "good job" - but at this point, they have painted themselves into such a corner that Episode IX would have to be the most brilliant script ever written in order to somehow undo all the contradictions of TFA vs. TLJ - and the only way I see they can even begin those gymnastics is to use cheap tricks, because anything short of "just kidding!" is just nearly impossible to comprehend.

 

[AEfx]

Kylo lied.

It's what bad guys do.

In which case, bad, lazy storytelling - it means that they are dragging out for three films a really simple question because apparently no one could come up with anything else more compelling. That would be even sadder than what they did with TLJ. It is important, but to hang the entire thing on it is just depressing.

Seriously. A whole new universe, they essentially had a blank canvas they could have populated with new and interesting characters and compelling storylines - and the big point of the thing that drags on for three movies becomes the question of who Rey's parents are? I also find that highly unlikely, as half the point of the film was this "connection" the two supposedly had, and how Rey is more skilled at it than Kylo - I don't see him being able to have lied to her in that moment and it being believable.

That is also what really confounds me about TLJ - how they basically have boiled the whole thing down to two characters, Kylo and Rey, and their relationship. Kylo, who is just basically retelling Anakin down to his little temper tantrums (except that at least Anakin did have a crappy life growing up, unlike Kylo who was essentially a prince and raised into a family with enormous power), and Rey, who has just become the poster child of a Mary Sue (and boy do I hate having to admit that, after I so vehemently defended her post-TFA).

Poe and Finn might as well not even have existed in this film. We learned nothing about them, they didn't develop at all as characters. Poe could have been any random member of the resistance. All we saw of Finn was what we saw in TFA - a guy who comes up with risky plans (that ultimately don't work out or make things worse) and who apparently makes goo-goo eyes at every woman he talks to for five minutes.

I keep waiting for someone to say something profound about TLJ aside from generic superlatives - no one seems to really be able to get down in the mud and explain in detail why they thought it was such an amazing film or how the plot/characters were somehow so wonderful.