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Yes, they copied the original Star Wars trilogy but done bad. RIP Star Wars.
I remember enjoying The Force Awakens in the cinema, but I probably enjoyed it about as much as I would have enjoyed rewatching A New Hope, because frankly they're the same movie.
I started watching the 2nd one in the new trilogy (don't even remember the name) and got bored. Never watched the 3rd one.
And then there was Rogue One, which I also watched in cinema. I did enjoy it, but it was also an absolute nothing burger of a movie with 0 lasting impact or characters worth remembering.
I found Rogue One a satisfying conclusion to the independent Andor story.
Seems like a lot of the entertainment Disney makes tries to be extremely average. Not edgy, not offending anyone. The end result is almost like AI slop before AI slop existed. Entertainment so mediocre that it doesn’t make you feel anything.
Just enough to maintain their grip on the IP and make some merch sales
Disney movies are theatrical length ads for merch and experiences. The animation style for BB-8 was 100% prioritizing driving merch sales.
"What if we had tiny droid but ball?"
And then: "what if we had even tinier droid that does nothing but act like a scared puppy?" for D-0, literally the most useless droid in all of Star Wars history; moreso than the mouse droids from the OT.
my old professor called it "Attraction to Mediocrity" - the idea that over time things move towards the most average as you try to please the most people
Movie by committee.
Rogue One was the only decent star wars story in recent history. It was within the star wars universe but wasn't a total rehash of the same Jedi story.
If they had done the Solo twins storyline with the Jedi academy they would have had all the YA books to pull ideas from that was original stories instead of the modernized remake.
They trashed everything from the extended universe. I’m super sad about the Skywalker family, especially Mara. I also really liked Jeter’s Boba Fett trilogy.
I legit liked BB-8, Maz Kanata and Babu Frik. Could do with more of them.
As for the films:
Force Awakens - Mostly harmless. Gets a lot of hate for "just being Star Wars again" and that's valid. But they needed to prove they could do Star Wars without Lucas, and they did.
Last Jedi - Looks great, absolutely shits the bed. Johnson needed an average 8 year old to come in and point out all the plot holes. "Here's this tracker, you can use it to find us anywhere in the universe." (Same scene, no cuts, First Order comes out of hyperspace) "HOW DID THEY FIND US! THAT'S IMPOSSIBLE!"
Rise of Skywalker - I feel bad for this one and generally give it a pass. Last Jedi painted them into a corner by killing Snoke, killing Phasma, killing Luke, reducing the size of the Resistance to something that could fit in the Falcon... and then... THEN Carrie Fisher up and dies. I don't know what else they could have done. It was supposed to be Leia's movie. 😟
Rise of Skywalker is the worst, because they couldn't decide between ignoring Last Jedi or retconning it.
Half of the movie is Abrams making a sequel to a middle movie that was never made, and the other half is trying to please upset fans who hated Rose and the idea that Rey could be special without being related to some kind of franchise royalty.
In the end, they had an aimless film with no story direction that flipped between a confusing mess and some kinda fanfic hate letter to Johnson.
RoS was so bad it makes any negatives of episode 8 pale in comparison.
Oh no, Chewy is dead! Wait he’s alive.
Can’t access the sith language [for some reason].
The dagger is a map! But only if you stand in this one exact spot and even then it just kinda points in a general direction to a place on a crashed ship.
Just nonsense.
I legitimately forgot all of those plot points. I saw it in the theatre right after it opened and mostly remember it being really bad and aimless with Palpatine having been resurrected off-screen with no explanation, and the movie working hard to act like 8 didn't happen.
I walked away thoroughly unimpressed and don't even remember much of what happened.
Like - after your recap there, I still don't remember anything about Chewie dying OR not dying, and I still don't know if he made it to the end. I was (and still am) a die-hard Star Wars fan, and I can't believe that not only do I remember the last film so poorly that not know if one of the OG heroes survived the last film, but I don't really even care.
TL;DR: Agree on TFA. Disagree on TLJ; it is the best sequel. TRoS is almost unforgiveable.
I will stick up for The Last Jedi til the end of time. JJ dealt Rian Johnson a bum hand with Luke. The only options are shame-based self-exile, or something that would be concealed by a story of shame-based self-exile. There was also clearly a mandate not to make the legacy heroes the ones who solve the problems of the plots. That's to say nothing of JJ resetting the political board in the least helpful way possible.
Given the constraints, I think RJ did a great job making a more character-driven piece that actually tried to play in the sandbox JJ created. It added notes of ambiguity and, yes, subverted certain expectations, but not so many as it's accused of and still ultimately settled on the legend and the hope being worth fighting for. Poe's arc was good. Luke's arc was good. Rey's arc was a bit confused but ultimately effective. Kylo being set up as the primary antagonist of Ep9 because he was too deeply damaged to (immediately) redeem was probably the single best direction they could have gone. Then, as you say it looked great. It was also the only sequel to directly embrace the prequels at all, and it included two of the most beautiful "Lucasian" tone poems of the entire series with the Luke-Yoda scenes and Rose's sister.
Now, could certain things have been better? Yeah, definitely. Finn's arc was only an incremental move from the one in TFA, and one that might plausibly been implied from it. A bit of a time jump would have given the characters room to breathe and not have rubbed the more resistant fans' noses in Luke's resistance to training Rey. The your-mom joke had a narrative purpose, but it simply didn't land and therefore made the character beat less impactful. Rian should have understood that a non-negligible percentage of Star Wars fans want sci-fi consistency when they can get it and should have tied hyperspace tracking to the Holdo maneuver to make both of them too rare to be common either in the past or going forward. The set piece on Canto Bight could have been a little more Star Wars-y, which I think would have blunted accusations that it was boring.
For me, TRoS does NOT get a pass because it was such a blunt and heavy-handed reaction. It didn't need to have Rose specifically refuse the call to action because ~~some fans didn't like her~~ Leia gave her homework. Even if "Big Bad" wasn't JJ's preferred direction, it didn't need to immediately place Kylo Ren back in a subordinate enforcer role. It didn't need to half-assedly use outtakes of Carrie Fisher when it could have "Ben Kenobi'd" Luke to have a much more engaging training sequence. It didn't need to literally lift the conflict from some of the worst Expanded Universe stories or the climax from Avengers Endgame. It definitely didn't need to put half-baked fan theories about Rey's origins into a hat and then pick one randomly. Everything about it was petty and lazy and so much worse than it needed to be, even if you chafed at TLJ's choices.
I will die on the hill that while flawed in a lot of ways, TLJ was trying to do something interesting.
I saw the leaked plot of TRoS and refused to watch it.
Imagine continuing the trend of brain dead TLJ bitching, and immediately following it up with "I give RoS a pass."
Completely unserious take my dude.
Between Lost, Star Trek, and Star Wars, I hate J.J. Abrams. The only reason he even has a career is because he sucked up to Spielberg.
It’s because the sequels largely just repeated what the original trilogy did but worse. Don’t believe me? Okay I’ll point out some of the similarities.
The Force Awakens loosely follows A New Hope, desert planet > climatic escape > try to deliver plans/map > goes wrong > rescue mission > eventually deliver plans > blow big death ball up. The only difference between the two is that The Force Awakens swaps rescue mission and eventually deliver plans around.
The Last Jedi just copies what The Empire Strikes Back does but in reverse this time. Cold planet > big battle > escape > spaceship scenes > side quest planet > jedi side quest planet > confrontation with big bad > lightsaber lost > spaceship scene. The Last Jedi pretty much reverses the order with a few other things flipped around but it’s pretty lazy.
The Rise of Skywalker and The Return of the Jedi follow the same broad strokes too but are at least a little different now. Return to previously established planet > bad guy on evil ball #2 > plan goes awry > fight scene > meet with Jedi master for last time > big speech before final battle > super big space battle over evil ball #2 > light vs dark battle in main character > both sith die on evil ball #2 > celebration. Okay okay if you look at this one in more detail, adding in all of tRoS’ side quests, they are definitely different but the same loose structure is still there.
You can talk whatever shit you want on the prequels but at least they tried new things. They didn’t always work but they tried and I think it helps them actually stand out from the original trilogy rather than feel like a retread. They certainly do copy some of the major strokes at times but they do more to alter it.
There is also the problem with Rey in the sequels, we never really see her fail at something. When she tries to use a Jedi mind trick for the first time she gets it to work. When she tries to use a force pull for the first time it works. She never really gets tempted into using the dark side like Luke and Anakin did. When she tries to use force healing it just works for her. She doesn’t get a scene like Luke and Anakin had where they make a mistake and get punished for it. Luke and Anakin both lost a hand because of their mistakes. Luke fails with the training droid in A New Hope, he fails to raise his X-Wing out of the swamp and he fails his Jedi mind trick. Heroes need to have the stakes of failing to actually make their journey engaging and memorable. If they just succeed every time it can get boring and forgettable.
Comparing Rey to Saitama for a second here. The reason why Saitama works and Rey doesn’t is because Saitama struggles with how overpowered he is. He wants a real challenge when every foe he comes up against goes down immediately. Rey doesn’t have a real struggle, whenever she looks to be in a bind she just gets a new power that saves the day. She is the dictionary definition of a Mary Sue and it makes her so forgettable.
Sorry for the wall of text, I have a lot to say on the sequels as a hardcore Star Wars fan
It definitely was. The cultural impact of the sequels is much lower than the two other trilogies.
disney ruins everything it touches
I was the world's biggest Star Wars fan in the '90s. I read all the books and comics, I had the little spaceships. When I left the theater in 1997 after seeing the Star Wars Special Edition, it was like a punch to the gut. So many stupid changes. I hoped for more with Empire, but Luke screamed after his noble sacrifice, which really irritated me. By the time of Jedi, I was already expecting the worst, and boy, they delivered with that awful musical number.
But somewhere deep in my heart I held out hope for Phantom Menace. And that finally killed Star Wars for me. Later I sold or gave away all that stuff. I only kept the original Timothy Zahn trilogy, because I first read those before I even saw the movies.
So by the time we got the sequels I had zero investment. Force Awakens was... fine. A rehash with no original ideas. But I get it. Remind people why they like Star Wars.
I liked Last Jedi a little more than most, despite the clear trilogy pacing screw ups and go-nowhere B plots (casino planet, etc.). I actually really liked Luke's arc. It was something new and unexpected, but many Star Wars fans want the same warmed-over meal instead of something more dynamic. Same goes for the "anyone can be Force sensitive." Same goes for "the sacred texts!" And Luke demonstrated total mastery over the Force, holding to his Jedi beliefs, before he died. It was bold, not the typical corporate safe plots with all sharp edges filed down. It could have led in an interesting direction. Killing Snoke was surprising, but I had to imagine there was a plan there. This was a billion dollar franchise. Surely someone had a conversation before they approved the script.
Well, no. They didn't. I had assumed it was setting up Kylo Ren as the primary antagonist for the next movie. But Rise of Skywalker ended up being one of the worst movies I've seen in my life. Not worst Star Wars movie: worst movie period.
How do you make a good Star Wars 9 after 8? Well you sure don't bring Palpatine back in the 9th inning with zero foreshadowing. And you definitely don't materialize 10 million Star Destroyers out of thin air.
The original trilogy was great. The prequels were flawed and silly, but at least there was a singular flawed and silly creative force behind them trying to say something. The sequels on the whole just sucked.
I'm not one to overthink movies, I really enjoy just watching them do their thing without thinking about it, But there were no twists everything felt so linear and so repeated.
I even liked solo because it was at least different.
I thought Solo was a lot of fun. It was great to watch a Star Wars film that didn't have galactic stakes. It felt more focused.
I remember enough that I know they do in fact exist. But I couldn't place anything in order, let alone mentally reconstruct them in my mind from start to finish like the other 6.
Nope. Your memory is fine. There were only two and a half good Star Wars movies of the original nine; A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi right up until the Ewoks arrive.
Beyond that there was some good stuff, like Andor and Rogue one.
I liked Solo.
Fight me.
It was ok. Certainly better than A Phantom Menace. But I think, aside from a cool sword fight scene and a giant fish The Phantom Menace was one of the worst movies I've ever seen.
They were forgettable. In order, we had:
I was a Star Wars fan all my life.
I became a Trekkie somewhere through that trilogy.
It was bad enough that it was a repressed memory. To this day, I still feel that the trailers for The Old Republic video game are 100% better than that whole sequel trilogy combined.
One day I sat down to watch the movie after force awakens (can't even remember the name). About 30 minutes in I had an extreme sense of deja vu. Come to find out I watched that movie in theaters and had completely forgot it. After that I watch ed rise of the Skywalker and definitely will remember that as being the worst stars wars anything I have ever seen... christmas special and babu frik excluded!. I felt bad for the actors on that one.
