lj-writes:

1. Choose ONE writer. This will be the George Lucas of the new age. JJ Abrams, Dave Filoni, just choose someone you think will take care of the franchise the way George did. (I am not saying JJ or Filoni should have been the ones in this position, but they wouldn’t be the worst.)

2. Balance out Lucas’s successor with a different director or multiple different directors. The Kershners and Marquands of the new age.

3. Spend THREE YEARS on each episode the way it’s ALWAYS been done. Absolutely no cranking out saga installments.

4. Keep an animated show handy to tide people over. Ideally, this show could tie into the sequels, taking place between them the way the 2003 Clone Wars miniseries tied directly into Revenge of the Sith and got people hyped for it after Attack of the Clones. Or, better yet, devote a show explaining what happened between ROTJ and Episode VII. But under NO circumstances assume people will watch it and not have to have it explained in the film. Give enough exposition for people who only watch the movies.

5. The anthology films are a good idea, much like the TV show. Work on them at more or less the same time as the saga films with a different crew and release them between saga installments. Again, three year gaps provide a nice middle year for anthology films to be released. Lucasfilm could get away with cranking these out instead of devoting huge effort to them, but obviously they don’t want people losing interest in the franchise.

6. Make the film clear for the Internet™ and explain it to them, because they won’t understand. None of this “is Reylo going to happen” BS. People should know what Lucasfilm’s intentions are and what messages it’s promoting.

7. The mystery box approach isn’t really the best thing for Star Wars. No one walked out of A New Hope thinking, “I bet Vader is Luke’s father!” or “I bet Leia is Luke’s sister!” Those iconic reveals punched us in the gut instead of building anticipation (during which time, theorists would figure out the twist before it happened.) On the other hand, be sure to subtly set up the reveals so they don’t come off as butt-pulls (coughs at Rey Nobody.)

swan2swan:

You know what really would have been something special in The Last Jedi but wasn’t included because it would have both given Rey character and given the audience a second to breathe?

If Luke had asked Rey what stories she had heard about him.

And she tells him that she’s heard so many, because he’s THE Luke Skywalker, but she knows a lot of them are myths. She’s pretty sure he blew up the Death Star but doesn’t think he blew up both, she doubts he moved a planet and knows there’s no way he rode a Sando Aqua Monster (“That one’s true, actually.”), but of course the most popular and mysterious one is about how he single-handedly killed Darth Vader and the Emperor.

Because everyone knows that story.

No one knows exactly how it happened, but they know Luke Skywalker went into the Emperor’s throne room with Darth Vader present and that both of them perished there. Some tales eventually began to say that Darth Vader was actually Luke Skywalker’s father, and that the two of them worked together to kill the Emperor, and then Luke Skywalker killed Vader in order to free the galaxy.

But the one Rey says she likes the most is one where Luke tried to save Vader, where he tried to bring him back, where they killed the Emperor but Vader was badly wounded, taking a fatal blow meant for his son. She likes it because it means that family matters, that people can be heroes even if no one else believes.

And Luke is astonished to see that someone is here who is not only powerful, but hopeful. And it’s not naivete, because she’s correct. And after years of people calling him the Emperor’s Bane, after years of people rejecting him once they learned of his heritage, after so much time spent in isolation believing that people would only want him back to bring a fiery sword upon the evildoers of the galaxy, here is a girl who gets it.

And finally, the Last Jedi knows that he can return.

rootbeergoddess:

Like here’s the thing.

Even if you like TLJ, there is no denying that it didn’t meet Disney’s standards and it divided the fans in a bad way. And even if Solo is just an okay film, there is no denying that it’s not doing well. Some people think it’s too late to call this film a failure but the fact that it’s lagging at the start is not a good sign.

Once again, I don’t think Kathleen Kennedy is this evil monster who is laughing at everyone from her dark castle but I do think that she is the person to blame here. Aside from being lazy, Kathleen doesn’t seem to give a damn. The issues with Star Wars could be fixed so easily. And people aren’t asking for massive change, people are asking for very basic things: focus on characters that don’t have much backstory, stop casting white brunette women as female leads, don’t have a Star Wars film come out every year, try to be more consistent with your stories, etc.  Yet she has refused to do any of this. That is why many people think it’s time for her to step down because it’s obvious she’s not going to fix things.

And as I have stated before and I will continue to state this because it has angered me so much, Kathleen didn’t follow up on any of her promises. Every single time there is an announcement for a new SW trilogy, it’s given to a white man. She said at the beginning she wanted to make SW diverse yet she won’t cast directors of color? Ava could do it. So could Ryan. I’d even take a Spike Lee Star Wars movie. Hell, why not let Taika Waititi do it? He’s a genius! Look at what he did with Thor!

Kathleen may not be evil but she’s not good for the Star Wars franchise and she’ll continue to kill it until someone bumps her off her throne.

rootbeergoddess:

I think one of the reasons Solo failed to meet Disney’s expectations is because they’re starting to rely too heavily on nostalgia.

As I’ve said, I legit have nothing against reboots or remakes but it’s been proven that nostalgia can’t be your only selling point. There are a lot of nostalgic properties that bombed at the box office because they were badly made. Jem, Robocop, Stepford Wives, The Wolfman, Psycho, I could keep going. Heck, the current Winnie the Pooh movie isn’t doing that well either.

Like if Disney wants to continue with the SW franchise, they have to make good products. Nostalgia can only get you so far.

trash-compactor-deluxe:

TL;DR at the beginning: I felt 8 was disrespectful to all
the characters. It is a satire movie that belongs in the comedy genre. It is a
Disney movie not a Star Wars movie. I made friends return their tickets that
they bought for me to go on other days because of how strongly I feel. I cried.

Below the cut it has spoilers obviously and it will be very,
very, long.
[This was original version written a couple days after TLJ. My opinions have changed a bit overtime, and I still hate this movie.]

Keep reading

425599167:

Rewatching The Last Jedi, it astonishes me how many opportunities the movie chose to squander. I have never seen a sequel so determined to do absolutely nothing with any of the setups or characters from a previous installment, or to remove the scenes that would carry the most emotional weight, and it’s really, really depressing to me. 

1. It retreads the Empire-Rebel conflict. The setup was there for a small, outmatched First Order, which had lost most of its resources with Starkiller Base, up against a mostly-intact New Republic, but I guess no one in the NR cares enough about the state of the galaxy to fight back. The NR is completely ignored and never even seen as a functioning entity, and everyone seems to use “Rebels” and “Resistance” interchangeably.
2. A Force-using protagonist was introduced who’s shown to be quite aggressive and reckless, potentially making her a more morally-grey character, then she turns out to be good by definition no matter what she does because she only exists to balance out the evil antagonist.
3. A former member of the Evil Army of Evil, who turns out to be one of the most empathetic characters in the saga, who used to be a cog in the machine, deserted them on moral grounds. You want subversion, there it is. A faceless, disposable mook became the deuteragonist. Or he was. Now he has his experiences as a child soldier played for laughs by making it seem like he was the entire First Order’s janitor instead of an capable, promising soldier who rejected them.
4. They had an antagonist who’d modeled himself after Darth Vader and was deliberately shown to reject redemption when offered, then the second movie is devoted to showing he’s potentially redeemable only to reiterate the same point.
5. There’s a journey to the first Jedi temple. Nothing is learned about the origins of the Jedi, or who the first Jedi were. The original Jedi texts are present. They are never read from. Very little information about the Jedi can be gleaned from this location, aside from what appears to be a focus on balance between the light and dark, judging from one mosaic. Luke’s criticisms of the Jedi apply to the order during the prequels, he doesn’t explain anything about how they began.
6. The temple has been watched over by a group of caretakers for an unknown amount of time and for unknown reasons. They appear in two scenes, both of which are comic relief, and answer next to nothing about them or their culture.
7. Rey’s training under Luke consists of two lessons (out of three he had promised, the third was deleted) and swinging a lightsaber around, unsupervised, for about thirty seconds.
8. Rey picking up the use of the Force so easily was a waste. Characters training in fiction is a great opportunity to see how they face and overcome challenges, and in the case of fantastical settings, to build up the mechanics of the world and how scifi/magical elements work. This is why Luke’s training with Yoda in ESB was so interesting. We can’t see Rey siphoning the skills from Kylo’s brain, we need to be told that’s what’s happening to explain how she got so strong so fast. The fact there’s an explanation for it doesn’t make it interesting to watch.
9. They didn’t even go all in with making Rey a completely independent character. If you want to contrast her with Kylo, being someone with no significant background or family vs someone born to a legacy and loving family who spat on it all, show why she’s worthier of it. Now instead of showing she’s a better heir than Kylo while having no blood relation to Luke, her interactions with him are tense at best and physically violent at worst. Instead of the expected outcome of her being important because she’s related to Luke, she’s important because the Force made her Kylo’s antithesis and dumped a bunch of power on her. Another character is still the source of her involvement in the narrative, just for a different, less-interesting reason. Instead of having the torch passed to her by her father, Rey gets shackled to a Neo-Nazi school shooter. 
10. They wanted to show a hero coming from an unassuming background, and did nothing with Finn, whose background is unknown, never implied to be important, and considering the FO probably doesn’t bother to keep detailed records of its child soldiers, potentially impossible to find out.
11. Didn’t have Leia mourn Han at all, and removed his funeral from the film despite initial plans to include it.
12. They deleted the scene showing Luke grieving over Han’s death.
13. They deleted the scene that develops Phasma by exposing her cowardice, develops Finn by letting him be the one to confront her over Starkiller’s destruction, and develops the stormtroopers by depicting them as real people with their own doubts and the potential for revolt. All that was gone in favor of “Let’s go, chrome dome”.
14. They deleted the scene set during the evacuation depicting Connix warning Poe that they needed more time to escape, which is what motivated him to go against the FO fleet and buy time, showing his devotion to his comrades and willingness to throw himself in danger to protect them. This is cut, and Poe is repeatedly implied to be hot-headed and glory-seeking despite his actions being based around the aforementioned motives and no alternative scenes were included, we’re just told he was being reckless despite his behavior in both movies being inconsistent with that. Poe’s actions cost the bombers, but it took out the dreadnought and saved the people on the transports.
15. With all the talk about the core theme of “failure”, instead of having the Resistance attack on the dreadnought fail, it succeeds. They could’ve shown the plucky, rag-tag fighters utterly fail against the First Order’s indomitable war machine, but instead, they accomplish their goal. Yeah, they lost their bombers. Costing about 50 casualties and the most incompetently-designed ships in the franchise doesn’t matter much compared to 215,000 enemy combatants and the FO’s second-largest warship getting taken out. That’s a damn good resource exchange and I don’t know how much better than a 4000:1 kill ratio Poe would need for people to stop criticizing him. It’s probably higher than that already depending on how many people went down with Starkiller Base. The attack on the first Death Star cost all but three of the fighters sent to destroy it, suffering heavy losses doesn’t make it a defeat.
16. With Paige dead, and the movie treating the successful destruction of the dreadnought as a disaster and entirely Poe’s fault, Rose never confronts him about how he led her sister into the battle that killed her despite interacting after Rose’s introduction focused on her grief. 
17. Rose is established as a mechanic, and never shown making use of those skills.
18. Admiral Ackbar is killed after giving him a single line anyone else could’ve delivered. Yeah, he’s liked by fans almost solely because of the “It’s a trap!” line, but that’s no reason to do absolutely nothing with him.
19. Jessika Pava and Temmin Wexley are just gone, apparently. They were minor characters, but they were still there, they could’ve been interesting, and now they’re gone. They’re either dead, which sucks, or they’re off with other Resistance forces elsewhere, which undermines the FO’s single-minded focus on the fleet we’re shown. A sequel should not rely on people being ambivalent to characters from previous installments to make sense.
20. Finn and Poe are prevented from interacting by separating them.
21. Rey and Finn are prevented from interacting beyond a hug, and they deleted a scene where Finn sees Rey’s parting promise to meet him again, shown to him by BB-8, who tries to comfort Finn. Like with Poe’s deleted scene, this provides context to his actions and was removed to make the character look worse, even though we can infer his motives from his development in the last movie.
22. Luke and Leia are prevented from interacting by putting Leia into a coma.
23. Leia is put into a coma so she can’t do anything else, either. When she’s finally out of the coma and calls for help from her allies across the galaxy, no one responds. Leia Organa, the last princess of Alderaan, who was present at the biggest battles of the Galactic Civil War, who led the Resistance against the galaxy’s would-be oppressor, can’t inspire anyone to action.
24. It’s asserted that the Jedi do not own the Force, which is a well-established aspect of the universe in many other Star Wars works. Then no new insights into it unconnected to Jedi teachings are provided. The film ends with Rey carrying on the Jedi’s legacy anyway.
25. Maz Kanata, a Force-sensitive non-Jedi, appears for a brief cameo and is not connected to the whole anti-Jedi bent the film’s on at all.
26. Both Rey and Kylo state they’ve had visions of each other’s future which inform their actions and expectations of each other. Neither are shown or described in detail. In Kylo’s case this might be understandable because he’s almost never the viewpoint character, but Rey was shown visions of herself by the Force in that cave, something could’ve been added there.
27. What happened to Luke’s green lightsaber? I assumed it was destroyed when that hut collapsed on him in the flashback, but I can’t find any confirmation of that. It’s the saber he constructed himself and wielded after losing his father’s, it’s relevant to his character, but it’s completely forgotten. Including by Luke himself since he Force-holograms up the old blue one.
28. No information is provided on the Knights of Ren and the film doesn’t even acknowledge their existence. They are presumably other students of Luke’s, but neither they nor the other Jedi-in-training they presumably killed are seen. Apparently they were considered as replacements for the Praetorian Guards, but were cut because that wouldn’t make sense and there was no room for them otherwise. Here’s a thought: if Kylo Ren is taking over the First Order from Snoke, have him fight the guards alongside the knights.
29. No information is provided on Rey’s parents aside from their irrelevance. If what Kylo said was true, have the guts to show the damn drunks explicitly and stick to that explanation if you’re going to do it. It also doesn’t address who was on that ship in Rey’s flashback in TFA.
30. No information is provided whatsoever about Snoke, including him being completely absent from the flashback scenes showing the moments before Kylo Ren destroyed the new Jedi despite his explicitly-stated relevance to Kylo’s development around that time.

It’s nothing. This movie is nothing. The problem isn’t “subverting expectations”, the movie actively doesn’t use what it’s given and then replaces potential payoffs with nothing. These are all setups provided either by The Force Awakens or The Last Jedi itself, and the movie either ignores them or cuts them out for the sake of time. It’s become a cliché criticism to bring up the milking scene, but the fact they left that in while cutting out all those deleted scenes shows how monumentally fucked up Rian Johnson’s priorities are. What really hurts is that it could’ve been great, but everything that could’ve had emotional weight and character depth was deliberately stripped out.

hakuna-machete:

Has anybody who thinks Han Solo is the personification of a suave cool guy ladies man ever actually seen Star Wars? Han Solo is the personification of someone trying to lean all casual against a wall while saying a witty one liner and then falling straight through an open door instead.