Latok wrote:I don't see how Finn and random character #53 going off to do stupid shit on a gambling planet is TFA's fault
TFA didn't give any of these characters (except Rey) anywhere to
go.
At the end of
A New Hope, you've got Luke set on his path to become a Jedi, you've got Han midway into a redemption arc (and, yes, Harrison Ford is right that he should have died when that arc ended in
Empire, but that's another story), you've got Leia leading a fairly well-defined Rebellion against a fairly well-defined Empire and specifically the villain of Vader -- who isn't very deep at this point, but whose characterization in just the ANH "lack of faith disturbing" and Obi-Wan fight scenes is more consistent than anything Kylo Ren did. You don't know the full story behind the Rebellion and the Empire, but you don't need to to understand the story on screen and the characters at the head of each.
At the end of TFA, you've got Rey on her path to become a Jedi. Not surprisingly, the continuation of that storyline is the only part of TLJ that really works.
You've got Finn, who is... a nice guy? Where does that character go? He has no defined goals, no serious defects that need to be fixed. The entire
interesting part of Finn's story happens in the very start of TFA, when he decides to defect. The only thing he's got by the end of TFA is a potential nemesis relationship with Captain Phasma, but we don't understand her or their relationship well enough from TFA to really care. With his most significant relationship -- Rey -- isolated by her subplot in TLJ, he's really at loose ends. So Rian Johnson naturally generates a new relationship for him and tries to send him off to do
something that can let him deal with that Phasma loose end, with a lot of bombast and spectacle along the way to hide how little he has to work with.
And Poe. Poe is... also just some nice guy? He's a good pilot at the end of TFA. That's it. He's got more and funnier lines, but, dig beneath the surface, and he's basically Movie!Wedge Antilles. To get him in the new movie doing something -- anything! -- Rian Johnson had to invent a whole layer of characterization and conflict for him. But it all came across as stupid and contrived and not grounded in the character (or logical sense) because it wasn't. Worse, Johnson had to figure out how to draw Poe into conflict with Leia, because Carrie Fisher was in the movie and Expectations Had Been Set, even though the second movie in the new trilogy
desperately needed to spend more time on the new generation of main characters. (Luke was in the movie too much, too, honestly. Although I think Rian Johnson absolutely nailed Luke Skywalker, a man who has never ever won a single on-screen lightsaber battle.)
Can we care about the galactic struggle between the First Order and the Resistance? No, because none of that conflict makes any sense. It was one thing for ANH to tell us about an Empire that had been around for a while and a Rebellion that was rising up against it. But to tell us, six movies later, after watching the Empire fall, that the Empire is back (????) and the New Republic is somehow completely unable to do anything about it (????????) snaps suspension of disbelief. None of it adds up. The long retreat convoy thing made as much sense as anything.
What I'll concede Johnson could have and should have done better: he ought to have recognized that one of the only things Poe and Finn had going for them was their bond with one another from the rescue in TFA. With Rey off on Blue Milk Planet, Poe and Finn should have spent the entire movie together being buds. It still would've been either (a) pointless like Finn's plot or (b) contrived like Poe's, because neither character has anything to DO outside of Mary Sue Rey's central arc, but it would have been less noticeable if Finn and Poe were palling around the whole time cracking jokes.
The other thing Johnson screwed up -- and this is huge, he really screwed it up -- is by allowing the movie to continue past the battle in the throne room. The correct ending of
The Last Jedi is:
Ren: No, no, you're still... holding on! Let go! [quickly calms down] Do you want to know the truth about your parents? Or have you always known? And you've just hidden it away. You know the truth. Say it.
[Rey continues to tear up] Say it.
Rey: [tearfully] They were nobody.
Ren: They were filthy junk traders, who sold you off for drinking money. They're dead in a pauper's grave in the Jakku desert. You have no place in this story; you come from nothing. You're nothing...
...but not to me. Join me. [he extends his hand towards Rey] Please.
[OFF Rey's ambivalent reaction]
ROLL CREDITS
Then you spend the next three years arguing about what Rey's answer will be and what kind of galaxy we return to in IX.
But the fundamental structural problems in TLJ, the contrivances, the weird character beats, all the wasted time, are all because TFA was a bad movie that left TLJ precious little to follow up on. Perhaps a better creator than Rian Johnson could have saved it and knitted something better together in the wake of TFA, but the challenge was far more immense than it should have been, and TLJ turned out... roughly how I'd expect, given its starting point.
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