ST Rian Johnson (Director Of TLJ) Discussion Thread

Rian Johnson (played by Mikey Day) on SNL last night. So telling for The Last Jedi. Also features stormtrooper Daniel Craig.

 

For all the SW fans in general, here is an awesome video titled DEFINED STAR WARS that focuses on "The Last Jedi".
Enjoy:

 

I haven't read this whole thread but I'm surprised not to see any references recently to Rian Johnson's film Looper. When I saw the Last Jedi it seemed really clear to me that he was following a similar thematic interest with Kylo Ren as a certain character in Looper although I do not want to spoil it.

 

It left him with a $500m contract with Warner Bros.

 

Hopefully Warner Bros then left enough in the kitty to pay someone else to come in and complete his (JJ's) stories and resolve the narrative properly.

 

I know, but that was not my point. He looks like a really good business man and politician, not so much a filmmaker -not saying this only because of TROS, for I am also looking at the rest of his filmography-. I was talking about JJ himself. He either doesn't care at all, or he is devastated.

 

#ThankyouRianJohnson trending at #2 the day TROS hits digital. LOL

 

Yeah. I see that too.

 

Why? I'll thank Rian Johnson for "Looper" or "Knives Out". But for "The Last Jedi"? From a critical point of view, that movie is coming off as one of the most overrated ones I have ever seen in pop culture history. I do think it is a terrible movie. It's not that because many think it's simply original. It's not. Not by a long shot. I believe Johnson had borrowed a lot from both "The Empire Strikes Back" and "Return of the Jedi". I found his ambiguity overrated. His movie, like Abrams' "The Force Awakens", was filled with too many plot holes. And his "anyone can be Force-sensitive" message struck me as irrelevant and rather laughable.

 

Your free to think whatever you want. I was simply sharing that it was the top trending item in the USA this morning, the same day that TROS hits digital. It’s funny

 

Well Star Wars does that all the time. Sam Witwer had a big interview the other day talking about the Clones Wars and other topics, and he said a major theme in Star Wars is leaving it open for audience interpretation on the story. That’s why they didn’t have him speak during Mauls death, they wanted the audience to decide things in that moment. Probably also why they didn’t have Ben Solo have one line.

 

That's old news to the kids of the late 70s and early 80s, Mark Hamill has been saying that for over 30 years. Go through all nine films and there are moments left for interpretation and even reflection.


It was rather unique in a fanbase for it's movies to evoke such extreme reactions, though that has changed to a lesser extent for Marvel, DC and other franchises. Yet nobody has ever claimed Batman Vs Superman or X-Men 3 or Iron Man 3 had raped their childhood, like the reaction was to the PT and then again to a similar hysterical reaction with the ST.

 

Didn't maul speak to obi wan as he died? What the hell is anyone supposed to interpret from a scene where a character dies, besides, "this character is about to die, i'm sure he/she is disappointed". Interpret this, interpret that. As has already been pointed out, "ambiguity" is being used to mask the fact that someone wrote a nothing story. If I'm to just imagine what the story is, then what the hell do i need with a writer, director, film crew, actors, FX artist, etc.?! The PT and OT did not leave things ambiguous. They told their stories love it or hate it. Upon seeing it, i immediately decided that i liked rogue one more than TFA because RO didn't rely on hack gimmicks. It told it's story. There was nothing to "interpret". You use your eye balls to watch the moving pictures. You use your ears to listen to the dialog and sound effects. You use your brain to understand the story thats being fed to you. It used to be simple, but now that the level of talent has dropped off a cliff, we're all meant to imagine the story that a multi million dollar film displayed. What is happening?

Whenever RJ or JJ or any of these new age directors start speaking about "ambiguity" or "interpretations" and "what the story needed", my eyes can't roll back far enough. Every time i saw an interview or a stage panel where RJ was talking about his writing process when working on TLJ, he has this pretentious posture as if he'd been working on a fine tuned machine with intricate circuits. This frustrates me because I'd really like to ask him: "why did snoke unlock rey's cuffs?", "why did murdering his own father mean virtually nothing, but murdering a literal stranger was supposed to complete kylo's darkside training?" "why did the first order use the walkers in the assault on crait?", etc. I wouldn't ask these questions to be mean. To this day, I still don't know what kylo ren wants. I don't know why rey wants to be a jedi or why she's involved in this war. "Because its the right thing to do" is not a motivation. Thats why that line was meant as a joke when finn said it to Poe. A writer is supposed to comb his/her script and ask every little question imaginable. "why does this character do this? why?", "why does this happen? how?", etc. I watch RJ's films and it feels more like he's impressed with himself than anything. (after the donout hole monologue in knives out, i turned it off.) My mind unconsciously picks apart the logic of his films. That frustrates me as that shouldn't happen. I shouldn't watch looper and immediately ask the question, "why don't they just not send people's older self to be killed by their younger self?". RJ should've asked that and attempted to come up with a organic narrative reason why. He should've asked himself, "why does luke feel that the jedi should end even though he's seeing the absolute misery that the galaxy is experiencing in their absence? Why would luke be ok with the sith taking over the galaxy? Why would luke feel responsible for kylo ren, but then do nothing to stop his evil from spreading?" Instead, he picked scenes and visuals from past star wars films and just crushed them into his story. I found myself wondering if he actually was ever a star wars fan beyond in passing.


EDIT: If we're always meant to interpret things, then why did the director of TLJ tell us that we're supposed to sympathize/relate to the villain before the film even opened?

 

I tried to watch Knives Out on a free streaming service whose app is available for Android and Apple. I assume it’s legal because it’s available through them. Because of the possibility it’s not, I won’t name it here. A Google search turned up nothing.

At first watching Picard was no problem. Then it began slowing down, and I’d have to leave and come back. By the time I’d watched Episode 6 I could watch only 2:00 at a time. Just getting through the opening recap was torture.

The friend who’d recommended the app said it could be my iPhone is fighting the app, while her Android has no such issues. I reasoned it may have been because my share house’s wifi sux. Or it could be both. And if I watch 720p or even 1080p instead of 360p, that’s more data to stream.

So I went to Starbucks and their much better wifi and no problem and I had no problem with Episode 7, but it was really bad for Episode 8. Then I watched the first 3 episodes of The Clone Wars in 1080p. In each episode the stream would start to freeze 1 time each, then pick up, not freeze completely several times. Also, these are 22-23 minute episodes, not 48-55 minutes.

So then I tried Knives Out, which is 2:10. At 1:30 it completely froze and I gave up.

Too bad. Brilliant film. It’s the third RJ film I’ve seen. Well, almost. The first was Looper, and the second was TLJ 4 times. When I saw TLJ the first time I was shocked that Ren killed Snoke—despite having been spoiled.

Now I shouldn’t have been so surprised. With the twist with the boy in Looper and what appears to be a twist involving the protagonist, then Ren’s killing Snoke shouldn’t now seem all that surprising. It appears RJ likes twists, subversion, and deconstruction.

Meanwhile, still autocorrect sux, I haven’t been for months able to get automatic capitalization when I indent, and now I have to italicize the old-fashioned way.

 

Subversion is perfectly fine. You just have to remember that its not a substitution for an actual plot. Looper's subversion works for the same reason bladerunner's does. The protagonist is subverted right along with the audience. In TLJ, its just a bunch of sudden left turns with no rhyme or reason, often to the detriment of the story and lore. This is why the film, to a lot of fans, feels like a straight up troll or a middle finger. When fans first saw the "your snoke theory sucks" pic, they got real excited. It was only after realizing, that a person who didn't have a snoke theory/story, told them that theirs sucked, did fans become irate. The snoke issue felt like it was just mean spirited. Why say someone's theory sucks if you know you don't even have that? Why would you "punish" fans for being invested in the story? It was the same with the "filthy junk traders" reveal. Fans only expected a meaningful reveal to rey's parents because of the story thus far. Subverting fan expectations that she's luke's daughter with "haha they were nothing and died in the desert", even though the previous film showed them leaving in a ship, was a poor choice. What if rey's family was a part of some force cult from the unknown regions. They fled some kind of danger and stashed rey on jakku. That would be a subversion. Fans speculated heavily on one thing, but instead got something they didn't expect. What they didn't expect, has now opened a whole new area of speculation that has nothing to do with legacy characters. That works better than fans speculated heavily on one thing, but instead got nothing at all.

 

Some of us didn’t get “nothing at all” from the reveal of Rey’s parentage. Some of us got something pretty powerful. There’s nothing that could have been revealed about Rey’s parentage that would have been as moving or important as Rey’s desperate search to find her life’s meaning in others ending in the powerful message that she doesn’t need others to give her life meaning. Think of all the fans who have been dealt a bad hand in life, children who have been abandoned or neglected by their parents, who have struggled with insecurity their entire lives because their parents didn’t care for them or want them, think of the message that reveal sends to those people. You don’t have to be a Skywalker or a Palpatine, you don’t have to be royalty to be somebody. Your lineage doesn’t determine your importance. You determine your importance. That’s what the cave scene is all about. She wants to see her parents, but really, she wants to see who she is and what makes her important. She looks back, she sees herself. She looks forward, she sees herself. The message: She has no one to look to but herself to find her importance.

 

Anakin had the story of "Nobody". He literally has no father and his mother is a slave. Having Rey be a nobody is nothing new or special. Anakin already had that title.

 

I would still prefer Rey Nobody over whatever the hell Rey PalpaCloneWalker we got ended up being.

 

I would've preferred Rey be an actual Skywalker offspring (Luke or Leia), as it's the Skywalker Saga and she's the hero of the third chapter. But that is long gone now. She's a Palpatine... turned Skywalker. It is what it is.

 

Anakin literally had the Force as his father. He's Space Jesus or any number of demigod offspring. The opposite of a nobody.

If Rey had been allowed to have a parentage that was utterly insignificant in every way and abandoned on top of that for no reason relating to her powers, that her power out of nowhere was equal to that of the last Skywalker (or as I prefer, the last Solo) whose great-grandfather was Force itself would have been so powerful.

The Skywalkers are the literal definition of demigods. They were never no one.

And Rey is not and never will be a Skywalker by usurpation. She's a Palpatine and a lot of fans are that strongly against that choice of name by the writers. She had the opportunity to be a legitimate Solo and the meaning/origin of the name would have been poignant all on its own. That's the name of a nobody who had no last name and it was the name Ben returned to as his best self. I guess the name wasn't important enough for her (shocking degree of tone-deafness and marketing elitism to choose the name of Anakin and Luke over Han and Ben, given what these people represented to Rey).

 

Ben Solo is our Skywalker and he ultimately achieved what his grandfather sought out to do, so I have no problem with how they handled the Skywalkers in this trilogy. I even could have been okay with Rey Palpatine if it was actually set up and not embarrassingly shoehorned into the last film. My biggest problem with a lot of TROS is the terrible shoehorning of material that doesn’t have nearly enough support to back it up.

 

Well, you won't see me disagreeing with how shoehorned it was, but I felt Rey Nobody was also awful, as it became purely meta. Rey was never looking for her parents to be anybody, she just wanted a loving family to return to her. The way it was handled in TLJ was purely as if Rey turned to the audience and said "They're nobody, y'all... which I apparently care about deeply." It was hilariously bad, IMO.

Besides, @godisawesome said it best: Finn represents the nobody aspect quite nicely, in that we literally are never told anything about his parents or who they are. Finn is the Nobody of the sequel trilogy. Rey never was. Her backstory, her parents, they were *always* part of the story and always relevant to her arc. Finn's weren't. Rey was the hero of the sequel trilogy and needed a relevant backstory, and since her lineage was all they gave her, it had to be important. TFA set it up to *be* important. "Classified, big secret," says Rey, which is a wink and a nudge to the audience that it's supposed to be important. I think her parentage was handled awful and she should've just been a Skywalker from TFA, but they chose to make it this big secret, and in doing so, made it a mess in TLJ and TROS because the two directors didn't agree.

 

JJ was always going to make her a Palpatine as he said her parents were not in TFA. I guess RJ thought that was a rediculous idea (it was) and decided to make them nobody of importance.

I don’t think Rey was seeking out powerful parents at all in TFA or TLJ. The fact that they were nobodies isn’t what makes her upset. She’s upset that they were a couple drunks who sold her for drinking money. The fact that she came from a couple a horrible people that didn’t care about her (at the time we thought) is what makes her sad inside. She couldn’t care less if they were some strong force sensitive people. That was never the point. She wanted to be loved but TLJ nobodies works so well because she is a nobody who came from people they didn’t care a lick about her. That’s a lot harder for her to take on than her grandpa is Palpatine. She along with the audience is like whateverrrrrrrrr at that reveal. My audience on opening night literally laughed.

The fact that I’m talking about Rey’s parents at 3am three months after the ST ended on a Saturday night is sad lol. I need to seriously re evaluate my life.