ST Rian Johnson (Director Of TLJ) Discussion Thread

Somehow, I doubt the journalists who talk with him know much about Star Wars. He should be ashamed of himself, and he should go back into the background.

Frankly, after I watched TLJ, I felt like the Sequel Trilogy was over. I was emotionally exhausted by the movie. The whole story seems like like it was written by this serial killer who lives in a van down by the river.

(Just to be clear, I do not believe that the cars temporarily parked by the Willamette River are owned by serial killers. I know they are mostly people who are going fishing and swimming. I'm partially quoting this 2019 joke about Trump because he kept calling himself a "very stable genius." "And do you also have a van down by the river?" the person joked.)

 

That is perhaps the best review of TLJ i have ever read.

 

Well, thanks. But the movie's writer clearly sympathizes way too much with Kylo Ren. He is a man who killed people on screen in TFA, ordered them to be killed, attacked numerous places, etc. It would just seem that only someone who is a murderer or at the very least sympathizes with terrible people would write this. I actually agree with the fact that TFA was rated PG13 because I imagine that Ren's murder of Han Solo would be difficult for some children to watch. I recall that Vader's maiming of Luke Skywalker in TESB was difficult for me to watch as a young kid, and I believe I took at least a year or two to watch it again. Having said that, I don't know why TLJ is rated PG13, or TROS, for that matter. If certain episodes of TCW or Obi-Wan Kenobi were released in theaters, I could understand why they were rated PG13. But it seems like an attempt for the filmmakers to be edgy by asking that the movie be rated this. Capitalizing off of ROTS being rated that.



I appreciate that Mark Hamill was warning us about TLJ and this trilogy in general. But had the actor been anyone other than Mark Hamill (or someone like Carrie Fisher or Harrison Ford), they would have been fired. I can't imagine that working with Johnson was pleasant.

 

Mark is pretty clear on his feelings here. "Luke would never do that. A Jedi would never give up. But it's not my story anymore"

 

Ultimately, the key issue here is focus and direction. Abrams and Johnson decided to tell a story where Luke was positioned as a beaten and dejected man. I don’t have an issue with that as a concept… as mentioned in another post, the idea of taking the ‘hero’, and turning him into the antithesis of what he fought and stood for, is an interesting one. But by god, if you do that to Luke Skywalker then Luke Skywalker must be the main focus of the entire trilogy. It needs context, it needs substance, it requires a start and end point in order to reach a satisfying resolution. In Abrams and Johnson’s world, Luke is just an aside, there is very little context to anything… and the only substance is that which Abrams and Johnson took when writing these films.

 

And that's the problem. This isn't Luke's trilogy. It's supposed to be Rey's. But they decided to destroy/deconstruct Luke so extremely, that it took a whole movie to find him in person, and then another whole movie to find him again. Just so that dies and is brushed off the movie again. The middle movie should have focused on Rey, her character, her past, her challenges, her test, and perhaps, her failure. Instead, it focuses on Luke being to blame for Kylo, and Rey is third runner up as Jedi Therapist to both of them. Rey only gets a story when it involves either of them. She gets nothing for herself.

 

I think the sad part about the RJ thing is that it's pretty undeniable that Kathleen Kennedy clearly loved TLJ, at least up until its release and the audience's subsequent response. IMO, that means she has ABSOLUTELY NO CLUE. She is not up to this job. If you greenlit TLJ, you're not the right person to be in charge of Lucasfilm. No one with any sense could read that script and think it was good. Hamill didn't like it. Daisy and Jon Boyega didn't like it. It was an obvious piece of crap. Greenlighting that movie makes her responsible for it as much or more than RJ. Even a career as amazing as hers doesn't make up for ruining the nine part saga. That's always going to be primarily on her.

 

If I was George Lucas I would have stayed on made episode 7 and then sold to Disney forcing them to complete his trilogy.

 

I'd be willing to bet this has got to be one of George's biggest life regrets. He must be sickened by what they did to his baby.

 

Part of the Rian Johnson Empire interview:

“If Mark Hamill is talking to me about Luke Skywalker, I’m [going to] listen to him,” recalled Johnson. “And I [got to] think about that and argue with him and go back and forth, and genuinely plumb the depths of my soul and what I wrote and figure out if this seems right. Also, though, remembering that, obviously, he created the character on screen, but he’s Mark Hamill. He’s not literally Luke Skywalker. Luke Skywalker lives as a creation on that screen. He’s a myth, and as such, he only really lives in the minds of people who listen to and in various ways believe that myth. And I know that was me. So, it’s complicated. But I mean, the short answer to your question is it was f—ing terrifying.”

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The guy has lost the plot, Mark Hamill is Luke Skywalker in every sense, he's played him since 1976 ( filming ANH ) and has never been recast even playing him with de-aging for TBOBF, If Mark Hamill says this is not my Luke Skywalker then is isn't Luke Skywalker it's some lame imitation and to think there arguments were F terrifying means Mark Hamill had a passion for the fact this is not the Luke Skywalker he knows or anyone else knows.

 

It would be like James Mangold saying "you know what Harrison I'm gonna do this with Indy. Just show up and do your job." Hubris.

 

This, so much this. And we also need to remember that New Hollywood wasn't just about pushing the boundaries in terms of "heroes are cynical now", but also in terms of what could be done with plots and characters, and what could be shown on screen. And all of that stuff is being walked back.

Things like onscreen sex and nudity. Stories about straight-up villains who don't necessarily get their comeuppance at the end - or just ordinary people whose lives are naturally messier and less starkly divided into "good" and "evil" than modern mass culture likes to pretend. And, most of all, movies that are about stories or emotions or ideas rather than "intellectual property".

Not that they necessarily have to be original stories - Hollywood has been adapting other mediums from day one - but things that have a satisfying dramatic structure, a beginning, middle, and end. Things that aren't necessarily Part 22 of a gigantic, never-ending franchise. Movie franchises by definition are meant to be ceaseless, ongoing, moneyspinners, and thus ultimately without stakes or consequence in their internal storytelling.

Star Wars was a reaction to the excesses of the New Hollywood. But the genre it pioneered, the blockbuster film franchise so focused on spectacle that it doesn't necessarily engage the brain at all, has now been combined with the utterly jaded cynicism of New Hollywood in its apogee. It's the worst of both worlds.

These days it seems like all we're getting is interminable Marvel-style movie or TV sagas about mutant superheroes, or Jedi superheroes, or dragon-riding superheroes, or ordinary people who happen to be fighting John Hammond's cloned dinosaurs, and who might as well be superheroes for their improbable longevity. It's superheroes all the way down.

And yet, amid all that, we no longer believe in heroism.

 

I don't know what you are all talking about.
Last thing I heard was that "The King" is still working on his Star Wars trilogy, and would be extremely sad if it didn't happen.

 

That makes one of you.

 

There's an argument to be made that this trilogy would not have gone this far off the rails if Johnson did not write and direct TLJ. Abrams probably would not have been rehired for TROS, and he didn't know how to salvage the mess that Johnson created.

There are just so many absurd things that happen in TLJ. I would not have been surprised if one of the Rebels put his hand down to taste the salt on Crait. Also, in all frankness, I have no problem with long movies. I generally enjoy them. But this movie felt too long.

 

One of them literally does that and says Salt just so you know it’s not Hoth

 

I remember having a bit of hope when I heard Fry wrote the novelization, but after TLJ my opinion of him (and Pablo) has dropped a lot if they like TLJ, or rather I don't trust their judgment anymore. Like even aside from maybe finding failed Luke or Kylo interesting, the movie had awful pacing and jarring out of place humor. And its not like Johnson made the movie in secret, all the higher-ups signed off on it, and he was still their second choice for director for IX. Maybe that's why I don't watch Hollywood movies much.

I'm also still worried about how... oblivious the producers and current Disney-Lucasfilm were during the sequels, and not like management has changed much since then. Like we've seen a bit of Treverrow's drafts for IX, and it tried to follow up on what happened in TLJ with Kylo as the big bad, but of course Disney-LFL wanted something more like TRoS, with a soft reset and massive fleets out of nowhere and a magic redemption for Kylo.

Apparently none of them noticed how despicable Kylo is, or thought that it was a problem getting rid of the first easy excuse for letting Kylo off (in the form of Snoke), so instead they brought back Palpatine as another excuse to cover for Kylo. Johnson just came in and wrecked the overall plot of the movie (it looks like Kylo's already won the war by the end of TLJ) but no one above him was even thinking about how to wrap things up after that.

It wouldn't have surprised me if they had made an Episode IX Part 1 and 2 with how much there was to wrap up after TLJ (and for extra profit). Not that Abrams is a good or even decent director, but I hold IX against him a bit less than TFA, and at least neither of them are as bad as TLJ is.

 

Evidently some people have never heard of contracts, and press as being part of them. Or that pissing of one of the most powerful studios in Hollywood might be a bad move for one's career. No way was Disney going to let Hamill go off the ranch for the follow-up film to one that grossed two billion dollars. So you even tell when Mark seemed to have had a come-to-Mikey-meeting and he became much more circumspect after that.

It reminds me of Shatner's SNL skit where he goes off on the ST fans at a convention setting ("get a life!") Then while the fans are freaking out we see him off to the side being yelled at by the organizer (RIP Phil Hartman) shoving an official looking piece of paper at him. Shatner then comes back, and is all, 'well that was clearly evil Kirk from 'The Enemy Within.' Set your phasers to stun! Warp Factor 9!'

Oh, he was cynical about Star Wars...how groundbreaking. And welcome to all those critics who never really liked the SW earnestness, and corniness, and certainly had a level of contempt for the SW fandom. Which parts of the fandom DO suck...just like parts of any fandom suck. We don't want to give movies to them, either.

That RJ was allowed to be cynical in a Star Wars film was franchise breaking. Which Disney, of all entities, shouldn't have been happy with. Well except they were still so high on refuting all things Lucas that they went to someone willing to be anti-SW in a SW film.

As Tatianna would say...choices.

 

I think there’s a difference between being drawn to a character, when they have huge ‘in-universe’ and ‘real world’ significance, and being drawn to a character because the underlying narrative is screaming out for substance/context etc. We don’t really know the nature of Arndt’s struggle, but I’d imagine it was the former not the latter… as I can’t imagine a scenario where George Lucas would have wanted to present Luke as the anthesis of what he was in the OT, but without any of the substantial story focus/context etc. to make the audience feel empathy.

Even in TLJ, Luke plays second fiddle to the Rey/Kylo/Ben dynamic… which is why, even when Luke gets the screen time, he’s more a passenger than he is the ‘driver’ (pun intended) of the underlying narrative. This isn’t as much about Luke seeing the error of his ways, rather this is about Rey showing him he was wrong. Luke is much more a plot device, to create a greater connection between Rey and Kylo, than he is a character on a different part of his own story. I think that was a fundamental mistake. So Johnson takes a really bad idea (Luke running off and not helping his friends), and positions it in an even worse scenario (IMO).

I’m not really sure how that would be possible? It’s very difficult to set up an iconic/heroic character, have them forfeit all they stood and fought for, and then turn them into an effective mentor figure *without* the narrative focus, and within a single film, when they are only a supporting character. It’s like writing a Harry Potter sequel, where 20 years later, instead of Harry Potter being in an elevated position; he’s instead depicted as a deadbeat bum, whose given up on his friends and family… but at the same time expecting him to also be an effective Dumbledore type mentor figure to a new hero… all in the space of a single film. That’s not going to happen… not successfully anyway. And I can’t imagine any franchise… be it Harry Potter, Hunger Games, Spiderman etc. treating its main protagonist with such incompetence and disrespect.

That’s probably the dynamic they needed to establish in order for Luke’s characterisation (that of a broken man) to be more successful I.e. establish Rey as Luke’s daughter in the very first film. I said this elsewhere, but Luke needed to be as important to the plot/narrative of the ST as Vader was to the plot/narrative of the OT. The Luke and Rey dynamic needed to be at the heart of the entire ST. That’s how one best (IMO), keeps the legacy hero significant enough, whilst allowing a new hero to come forward. That’s how one hands over the torch in a more meaningful way. Having that relationship at the very heart of the story (think Anakin/Obi-Wan or Luke/Vader), and giving it the necessary script and screen time it required, is ultimately where the drama should have played out.

 

Oh, yeah. Now, I remember that. It's been years since I've watched this movie in its entirety because I can't stand it.

 

It felt too long because the movie had two climaxes, and yet still felt like nothing really happened. The movie should have ended in the throne room. That's where all the drama ends. The Supremacy is blown up. Rey discovers her truth. Kylo gets away. The Rebels are safe. You're basically emotionally exhausted by that point. And then you realize you still have another 40 minutes of Crait to get through where it goes totally bonkers.

And what's insane is that RJ wrote more than what we got. Finn and Rose had a huge story on Canto that was largely cut. Rey had a third lesson that was shot but cut. How could he write that to begin with? It would have been a 3.5 hour screenplay. Why did they green light a screenplay that long? Did anyone over there go "why is this star war screen play almost 4 hours long and have 2 endings? lol