ST Rian Johnson (Director Of TLJ) Discussion Thread

It’s sort of fascinating to look back at how the EU approached Imperial remnants, largely because by the time it was all said and done, you could tell that “Competent, practical, and ruthless” was the only real way to make the idea stick… and thus why eventually the Zahn and Stackpole characters and ideas (Thrawn, Fel, etc.) wound up being the de facto standard other Imperial characters were measured by… and mostly found lacking.

Remember how Karen Traviss tried repackaging Admiral Daala for a hot second as a serious character, long after she’d been driven into the ground from an already shaky premise? That didn’t exactly work out well…

 

Eh, if LFL wants him to make a Star Wars movie with his own original characters, that’s fine. If the subject and era is interesting to me, I will watch.

In TLJ I mainly resented being told that the way I have always viewed Star Wars, the OT characters, and the Skywalkers in general needed “improvement” or was supposed to change.

 

I think I’d argue that Poker Face is an excellent example, like the Benoit Blanc movies, of how Johnson does better with smaller stakes that he takes seriously, and where the characters are *his* characters, shaped by the dramatic rules *he* sets up for the story. I also think that Charlie’s ability to detect lies is likely more just a shortcut storytelling tool that lets him cut to what he sees as the main appeal of crime fictions, where problem solving and deductions occur.

I can see his experience on Star Wars encouraging him to come up with her her lie detector ability… although I’d point out that TLJ’s use of the Force is almost the exact opposite of the hyper-sensitive social skill Charlie’s power is, and that the extreme focus on human drama and details in his other films and Poker Face is also absent from TLJ, which is a very broad, illogical, apathetic and archetype heavy. Like, yes, Poker Face’s premise would work great as Star Wars premise… but I don’t know if Johnson knows that or would want to do it.

He really, really loves “Evil is Banal” as a central theme, and he really, really wants a more cynical world to work in - and that’s something that could and does work in other Star Wars fiction, in Andor, Rogue One, and even parts of the Prequels, OT, and other D+ shows. But it doesn’t work in TLJ, because Johnson can’t treat the characters as humans and the conflicts as tragedies for whatever reason.

So I think it’s more likely that, if Poker Face is based off some Star Wars adjacent ideas he’s had, it’s more liable to be upon further reflection and maybe even a realization of some of TLJ’s weaknesses… but that, by the same token, the critical evaluation required for that connection is unlikely, since I think that Johnson and TLJ fans know the film sort of falls apart if held to the same standards as his other work, and it relies upon a sort “This is escapist fantasy, rules don’t apply here and the characters are simple and are not all equal, and death doesn’t matter.”

Like, Jed from Poker Face’s second episode is exactly how Kylo should be written towards Rey, but even worse because he’s worse, and Charlie’s horrified reaction to hearing what her old lady friends were planning to do to a bunch of stranger kids when they were younger should be Rey’s reaction to hearing about the Hut incident, but even worse because Kylo followed through on it, Charlie’s reaction anger and vindictiveness at her friends being killed or hurt should be Rey’s reaction to what happened to Finn, etc.

If/When Johnson does more Star Wars, he has to hold himself to his usual standards and not go “I don’t have to work that hard because it’s fantasy for children.”

 

He can and generally is serious about the drama in his murder shows and stories...

But he seems to struggle consistently with scale and weight outside of his main cast, especially in contrast to other Star Wars creators. Andor, for instance, is probably the epitome of "Horrible stuff is happening off screen, and you need to regard that just as seriously as what's visible on screen" - but the rest of the films, even the more juvenile ones, are much closer to Andor than to TLJ on that scale.

It's why I think that, yeah, he clearly would probably handle himself much better with a Star Wars story with scale and stakes comparable to Poker Face - criminals and single murderers with a limited number of victims - but he almost seemed to be "shaken off" taking even on-screen crimes seriously in TLJ because of how horrific stuff was supposed to be.

It's like there's a barrier around his cast where, as long as everything stays within it, he can handle the horror and sorrow very well... but if the horror and sorrow is supposed to extend beyond the barrier, he has trouble taking any of it seriously for longer than a little bit.

 

The Spaceballs comparison is apt given that Kylo’s reason for turning can be boiled down to ‘good is dumb’.

And that’s the most benign take, when people are not extrapolating nonsense about Han and Leia being terrible parents and Luke being a terrible uncle.

 

Or, alternatively we'll love loving it if we watch it - because yet again, it's a story that has more respect for its characters and dramatic stakes than TLJ does, as TLJ remains the outlier in Johnson's catalogue as the only story from him to mock its own stakes and disrespect its characters, and remains the shallowest of his stuff.

Again, as both a compliment to Johnson and as a critique, he seems to be totally comfortable and an expert in the tragedy of one, two, or three deaths in his crime fiction, but seemed unable to grapple with even singular crimes in TLJ because Kylo, his preferred protagonist, was the killer, and because Johnson's idea for him was as a metaphor for adolescence not as a killer, and because he seemed unable to write a war movie well, for some odd reason.

...Also, Johnson has been the producer only for all but the first two episodes of Poker Face thus far; this last one was actually a story and directing effort form Natasha Lyonne herself, with Alice Ju helping with the writing. This is NOT to say he deserves no credit for the episode, but what credit he deserves is that of a producer, which could mean greater involvement or less involvement, we don't know yet.

Now, I also want to do this compliment and critique about the first two episodes, where Johnson wrote and directed the first and directed the second; both are probably my favorite from the show in terms of the tension and blend of character work with mystery storytelling, and both make me hyped for the next two episodes, because he's writing one and directing the other.

But both also have excellent entitled jerk characters who arguably "prove" that A) Johnson is quite capable of making a topical type of entitled, creepy badguy and doing it very freakin' well, and B) we can stop pretending he was trying to do that with Kylo, and was likely trying to do the opposite, in fact, and C) that its a problem that Kylo is objectively a worse human being with motivations no better than Sterling Jr. or Jed, but Johnson couldn't muster up enough empathy or intellectual perspective to have Rey react to Kylo the way Charlie, Sara or other characters react to Jr. and Jed.

I'd add that the excellently menacing and mundanely effective Cliff reminds me a bit of TFA's Hux in contrast to TLJ's version of the character; I think Bratt and Gleason both played their characters as quietly menacing professionals, but Johnson joined others in missing that about Gleason's TFA performance for some reason, and went Snidely Whiplash with him.

 

My issues with Johnson are:

Gratuitous and over the top images and scenes designed to do nothing other than shock people.

Lectures on how who we view as a hero or how we watch Star Wars is “wrong.”

The crass elevation of Kylo Ren at the expense of other characters, the absurd notion that “we can all relate” to him (or even that we should be able to) and the belief that of course the “young woman” would view him as romance material. It feels like gaslighting at worst, and at best, an assertion that certain people can do whatever they want and still be viewed as Not Really Evil, as long as they come from the right family and have enough privilege. Johnson’s narrative (to be fair not exclusively his) around Kylo is the GFFA equivalent of the ‘What about how sad he is that he can’t swim competitively anymore?’ narrative around Brock Turner.