ST Rian Johnson (Director Of TLJ) Discussion Thread

Maybe Johnson also thought that because audiences accepted the idea that Luke still cared for his father then audiences would get on board with Rey caring for Kylo, but a son wanting to bring his father back to the good side is WAY more understandable than rando lady wanting to fix abusive, violent, kidnapper dude that she just met a couple days before.

Johnson was probably also counting on the audience thinking, "we want Han and Leia's son to return to the light side!!!" So he was thinking, "well if the audience wants Kylo to return to the light side they'll accept Rey wanting Kylo to return to the light side and if they accept that then maybe they'll accept Rey making moony eyes at Kylo".

Still...all of that sucked.

 

Honestly, I think you're probably right about most of that reasoning. It just shows how wildly out of touch RJ and his team were in apparently thinking "what's the problem, these things are the same!".

 

I think you put more thought into it than he did.

This is why he sent the wrong message with this movie. He's telling us to sympathize with an abusive villain when there is no real reason to sympathize with him. In fact, he was made worse in this movie.

 

I think it's way worse than that. If you dig into RJ's philosophical inspirations for the movie, it's more like Kylo (young men) is not at fault and our fathers have failed us into leading us into becoming real men.

Rey is just a plot device for Kylo to discover himself. She, as a character, the main character in fact, means nothing to RJ. His story is about how the older male generation failed the younger male generation.

 

FFS, RJ.

 

This makes me wonder if people who liked TLJ and RJ's approach, will now claim that George Lucas would have done the same with Rey and Kylo because it's "like poetry, it rhymes".

Oh wait. This has been used as a response to negative comments about TLJ a million times since December 2017.

 

This sounds like Fight Club. And about as toxic.

 

Not only the thought, the reality. I still read posts about how it wasn't a happy ending for the OT3 because Kylo died. Not because they did, or that they were all estranged, died alone and their work was in tatters. Nope, it's because Kylo died.

Listen, when you've seen a comparison of Kylo's "expression" after he murdered Han with Leia's in the carbon freezing chamber, with text that unironically says "they look the same because they both lost him," what can I tell you?

Well, considering RJ worked on Breaking Bad, where the lead is, in any other context, the bad guy, and we'd just come off of Twilight where, y'know, the romantic lead is a vampire... And Loki. And Snape. And all the rest....plus Anakin, whose popularity baffled JJ. Vader is the most popular character so Kennedy wanted her cake and eat it too lead. For the newer fans, who are all they seem to care about, why would Han being killed mean anything? I've certainly read enough "well, Han and Leia were terrible parents and Luke was a terrible teacher" apologia for Kylo.

 

I compared the movie to Fight Club. But at least Brad Pitt's character had interesting things to say in that movie, and the movie is kinda against his extremism. I feel like TLJ is unresolved. I don't know whose position the film is endorsing exactly. I guess it is endorsing Rey and Luke's position, since the kid at the end is emulating Luke. But I think Johnson made this movie too confusing. It's like he wanted us to like Kylo Ren's argument...and then he undermined it.

 

I would be surprised if Rian Johnson called what he was writing a "red herring."



It sounds like he had not thought much about this before he filmed it and he hasn't thought any about it since the movie was released. That would explain why this is such an impossible mess. Actually, my significant other and I were watching the second half of TLJ with a friend who had had a gummy from the store. And she said, "You know, this movie still doesn't make any sense, but it's a lot funnier this way." I can imagine Kylo Ren's final scream at the end of the movie being hilarious in that state. It has been said that watching 2016's Suicide Squad is a good way to explain to people what being drunk is like. Well, TLJ must be a good way to explain to people what being stupid is like.

 

The hubris. RJ at it again.

https://thedirect.com/article/mark-hamill-rian-johnson

 

He minimizes what Hamill had to say. I'm not saying that Hamill could have fixed this movie on his own because Lord knows there were way too many problems in it.

Honestly, if I had written this movie, I would have gone with my original idea for the sequel to TFA. I preferred the notion of Rey being Luke's daughter. I actually could understand him walking away from everything, as Han said, if Kylo Ren and his gang had not only killed Luke's students but also his wife. If I recall correctly, the novelization for TFA depicted Ren saying, "It is you," to Rey when she telekinetically called the Skywalker lightsaber past him. So, my solution to this would be to say that Kylo Ren couldn't bring himself to kill a child, and thus, he wiped Rey's memory. That would actually bring a bit of nuance to Kylo Ren if he was eventually going to be redeemed. Plus, it fits in better with who I perceived Ren to be after TFA. Therefore, I could actually accept the notion of Luke exiling himself into an extended retirement if he believed his entire nuclear family had been murdered. That's a very traumatic thing to experience, from what I've read. If Rey arrived and he realized who she was, that would have inspired him to come out of retirement and train his daughter.

On a separate note, it would have made more sense if Rian Johnson had actually cared to explore who Snoke was. I remember him saying that Rey didn't know anything about him, and so the audience should be in the same boat. But that just makes no sense. The enemy is the enemy, and I'm pretty sure most people would want to know who this guy was. Personally, I think it would have been more interesting if Luke fought Snoke and Rey took on Kylo Ren at the end of the movie. From what we saw of Snoke's powers, it looked like he could be a match for Luke Skywalker. But Johnson nerfed him pretty quickly.

 

Whatever impressions Hamill had of Luke's character it certainly didn't affect his performance on screen, as stated by both parties Hamill put in his best performance for it.

 

I agree. I think Abrams, Kennedy and Johnson thought they were keying into (or simply reflecting?) what is so prosaic in TV and cinema these days i.e the antagonist that has good cause for their actions/the antagonist that is more interesting and complex than the protagonist. And whilst I'd fully acknowledge that this view may be the case in works of fiction (people are complex after all), I believe that writers/filmmakers have a duty to qualify that narrative. Violence and totalitarianism rarely comes from a good place, but is rather a perversion/corruption of socio-political norms and personal and state morality.

 

Yep, I was a HUGE fan of this theory at the time and really wished that this is the direction they would've gone in. Luke thinking that Ben killed his wife and daughter makes it much more understandable why Luke would briefly threaten Ben's life. Plus, it makes Luke's, Rey's, Ben's, Leia's, and Han's story WAY more tragic, and interesting.

 

I agree. And I would question how much Abrams, Kennedy, and Johnson actually understood Star Wars going into this. I've already critiqued Abrams and Johnson a lot on that score. But I recall watching this YouTube video from 2015 in which the interviewer is asking Abrams what Kylo Ren meant by saying that he "would finish" what Vader started. Then Abrams started talking about what Vader "was trying to do," but didn't really answer the question. It was strange. I think it was pretty obvious that Vader was trying to overthrow his master and bring his own perverted brand of justice to the galaxy. So, it should come as no surprise that Ren would have a similar plan in mind. As it turned out, Johnson made Kylo Ren unbearable and confusing in TLJ. If anything, he comes off as more unstable in the movie. It seems to me that Johnson was being outrageous for the sake of being outrageous, which could summarize most of his decision-making. Luke's a rude coward, Kylo Ren is predatorily grooming Rey, the list goes on.

I think the only times that violence comes from a good place is when it is done to defend oneself and one's loved ones from assailants. I can't really see totalitarianism ever coming from a good place, but I get what you mean. Good intention perhaps. Of course, it takes a really paranoid and depraved mind to run a totalitarian government. But, yeah. Kylo Ren is no Walter White. And at least Walter's motivations and perceptions were clearly explained. But he ruined and destroyed many lives. Clearly, Ren is a terrible person. However, to this day, I still have trouble believing that this is supposed to be Leia and Han's son, let alone Luke's former student. I can buy the notion of Luke having a difficult student, but not like this. And as my Mom said, "He looks nothing like his parents."

 

At the end of Fight Club, Helena Bonham Carter looks at Ed Norton and says, "You're the worst thing that's ever happened to me."

Rian Johnson is the worst thing that ever happened to Star Wars.

One man literally destroyed a nine movie saga in the eighth inning.

Funny how when he's responding to these questions, he is more than happy to explain how he felt he knew better than Hamill, but then he somehow fails to acknowledge the fact that the majority of SW fans did not like the movie, the audience scores were by far the worst for any SW movie up til then, and it's been acknowledged by JJ that figuring out how to follow TLJ was perplexing because there was nothing inevitable about what would come next. When there is no momentum going into act three, act two didn't work.

RJ committed writer/director malpractice. When will a journalist ask him about any of that?

 

Oh we can't put that all on Johnson. JJ was the first one to basically take the OT heroes and make them broken losers in TFA and then he tore down all their accomplishments and somehow brought back the Emperor and made Rey his granddaughter and had her make out with her kidnapper in TROS. Also JJ had Finn spend the entirety of TROS running around yelling, "REY!!!" JJ also killed off Leia which despite Carrie Fisher's death, he didn't need to do.

 

I understand why you would see it that way, and fair enough. But I don't believe there was a good way to do ROS. Bringing back the Emperor may seem bad in the way it was done, but IMO, because of what RJ had done in TLJ, Kylo had to be redeemed. For Kylo to become the big bad of three wouldn't work, if for no other reason than Rey had defeated him twice (once with certainity in TFA having never even held a lightsaber before, and then again in TLJ, when she left him for dead and could easily have killed him if she'd wanted to). That wasn't going to fly, so they needed a new big bad. What's better, the Emperor or some brand new character introduced in the last minute who up til now has never been involved in any way? At least it was a way to connect the ending to the beginning. Were there better solutions to the problems RJ caused? Maybe. But there were no good solutions, IMO. The story couldn't be saved, IMO.

Also personally, I didn't hate bringing the Emperor back (though I feel he could have been a ghost, which would have made much more sense) and I don't think Leia dying was necessarily a bad thing, although again, how they did it was pretty weak also also against their control. And at least JJ began to tie up the story arc with Finn having him establish his force powers. That was JJ trying to rectify what RJ had done with the character, and was most likely the original intention of the character. For me, I give JJ a pass on ROS, because everyone involved knew that they had screwed up with TLJ and there was no real good way to finish the saga, and yet JJ stepped up and did the best he could. Overall, I admired his efforts.