Interesting essay on The Force Awakens

[ShyViolet]

The writer (a huge and very knowledgeable sci-fi geek) absolutely hated it, but he does go into a lot of detail about why. (FYI: written prior to Last Jedi’s release.)


http://charliesweatpants.com/jj-6


(A bit of language, but mostly ok.)

[Randall]

The problem with TFA is the same as TLJ, which will be the same problem with RIS. There is no planning for these films, and the writing is rushed, rushed, rushed. Disney is destroying the franchise in their rush to profit from it. TFA should have been delayed for 2 more years in order for the franchise to have had a chance, and Disney has doubled down on their insistence to just get these films out. Airdropping Abrams into Rise of Skywalker at the last minute placed him in the identical, no-win situation he was in for Force Awakens--- but worse, actually, because now he has to deal with the mess that Johnson made of things, all with Kathleen Kennedy's blessing. At least when the sequels were a mess, we just had the franchise's creator to blame. Now his baby is being mishandled by others. I don't blame Abrams, even if I didn't approve of TFA. The script he turned out, largely re-creating A New Hope, was the result of having no time to come up with something newer and better. (Of course, he may have done no better with more lead time, but we'll never know for sure.)

[EricJ]

Um, didn't Lawrence Kasdan also do the screenplay for TFA?
(Which is why it felt a little more like a "true" Original Trilogy film than Rian Johnson's fanboy-fiction for TLJ, since Kasdan always knew how to write dialogue for Han Solo. And who knows, maybe Kasdan's Luke wouldn't have been a jerk if the writer hadn't been off of TLJ, so he could write more dialogue for "Solo: A SW Story".)

Rian Johnson may have tried to "out-Empire" his own fanboy-legacy myth of "how cool Empire Strikes Back musta been like", but if they'd gotten the REAL writer of Empire Strikes Back on it...

[Ben]

SW has always reacted to the fans' wishes. Empire was the first and only film that stuck to its guns. There’s a reason Kurtz and Kasdan left through Jedi, and that’s because George started to let the fans dictate. Ewoks? Let’s sell more toys with what are the reverse of Wookiees. Even the name is a simple reverse. Phantom further pandered to the kid audience Lucas was going for; when fan backlash said they hated Jar Jar, Jar Jar was pretty much gone from the follow-ups.

At least Johnson didn’t go this route, but went so far wrong by going so far in not following it, he went in the opposite direction! It is because of the fans and SW's need to win them back that Rey will end up being a Skywalker all along, even if that might not necessarily make the most sense now or even be that satisfactory emotionally.

With all said and done, they should have stuck to George's original treatments for this new batch, and allowed the new writer-directors to come in and tinker, but stick to the overall structure.

That way, this trilogy would have been a real passing of the torch: "story by George Lucas" would have been the credit on each film, with the new blood bringing those stories to completion and working in enough new elements to then continue forward in their new lines of thought.

At least then this final Skywalker trilogy would have followed the same thinking from the same guy that created the whole darn thing in the first place, for good or bad. At least it would have been coherent to what came before. It couldn’t have been any more messed up than where we are now.