ST Rian Johnson (Director Of TLJ) Discussion Thread

Rian Johnson you must be the only person on earth who thought it was a good idea to force project Luke and not get him off that Island and face Kylo in the flesh oh yeah and not kill him off either.....

 

Yeah, that's the problem. Advertising a black character as a Jedi and then having him sidelined and his position as the male lead stolen? Who really thought that would be a good idea?

I mean, sure, you have your "She was the Jedi the whole time!1!!1" plotline, but from an ethical standpoint it's certainly not a good look.

 

Get out. /TCF

 

what in the heck is a [Removed]

 

You're reducing all of the potential other directions to their barest components.

 

which, in return, allows you to expend on it. That's how discussion works.

@christophero30

Statements that everyone in the industry knows he ruined SW sure do. And mind you, good bad is in the eye of the beholder. But claiming that he is something from industry POV that he almost certainly isn't, and after success that shows SW stint didn't hurt his status one bit, that's what I go after. There's absolutely no evidence, in the light of his star-studded movie that earned him his first Oscar nomination, that the industry views him as a franchise killer and business liability. he is making a sequel to Knives Out. He has joined the same Netflix deal that D&D (GOT showrunners) abandoned Star Wars for. So even if LFL decided that he isn't the best fit for SW (as in cancelled his trilogy), industry is more than happy to have him on other projects. So, no, the industry does not think he ruined anything.

 

I think the SW thing is more writing stuff, to me.

Kylo achieves his full potential in power. Luke, with Rey and maybe Leia, fights him and tells him that his goals are the same as the sith before him. Kylo realizes he's right and, in a declaration of killing the past, with no more stormtroopers, sith, empire, uses his powers to force all the first order ships to fire on eachother, essentially destroying the first order. He protects himself from this destruction. Luke and such escapes. We end on Kylo having destroyed the first order and seeking out instead to build a dark sider army.

 

Why would Kylo care about what the sith did to then destroy the first order? because he says let the past die? to be fair the sith once had an army of dark siders, they destroyed themselves with their greed and desire for power. which is why the rule of 2 was created. then, of course, they died out. and then the empire ruled for 20 years under an apprentice and a master, keeping the balance of the rule of 2, and then of course the first order. the big thing to take into consideration about controlling an empire is that you have power in numbers and technology at your control. you take that away and you don't have power and thats what dark siders desire. more, not less.

 

He wants to forge his own path, beyond what was done by the sith before him. He wants to be different and important. It's doing something new in the Star Wars movies. Empire, stormtroopers, all been done in the movies before. How's it gonna end? The scrappy rebels fight the sinister stormtroopers, while our hero duels it out with the black clad villain. From what I remember reading/hearing, even DOTF story didn't do much past this.

 

No, the point is that you're purposefully leaving out the fact that context can change any of those scenes. Kylo could injure Luke. Luke could injure Kylo. Either of those two options can make a good story with the addition of context to add meaning to the scenes. Like, in every film ever.

People in the industry being aware that Rian Johnson directed the film (The Last Jedi) that lowered the popularity/success of the Star Wars brand and being willing to collaborate with him are not mutually exclusive.

 

The Last Jedi, didn't lower the brand any more then either TPM or ATOC.

 

You know that's not true. Like, you can straight up see the difference in the effect those films had on the brand.

 

Yeah i remember the feedback to TPM should we ask ahmed best.

 

You dont remember merch sales tanking or a sw movie losing money because it didn't happen. Notice how best's horrible experience had everything to do with some "fans". Notice how boyega's bad experience is due to some "fans" as well as Lucasfilm.

 

TPM did not make as much as projected and never beat titanic while the original Star Wars was the highest grossing movie ever when it came out.

 

Tpm was not a bomb.

 

I actually disagree. i don't think TLJ damaged TROS in any way. TROS could have gone many different directions really. it wasn't stuck in a corner unable to move anywhere. Johnson closed most of what was set up sure. but JJ could reopen whatever he wanted or move forward however he wanted. which he did do really.

 

Regarding Rian's talents as a director in TLJ, I don't think he accomplished anything special. Much of the humor falls flat for me, and I don't believe he ever got Hamill fully onboard. His performance in the Yoda scene is particularly forced, the clearest example where Rian took things too far, but Isaac and Dern never click either imo, and I still maintain it's not a visually pleasant film. The grading feels antiseptic, the camera zooms feel anxious, and whatever's going on the color red seems bewildering. Many of the action scenes range from fuzzy to incoherent, like Luke vs Rey and the Fathier chase. When we finally get to Luke vs Kylo, it's just underwhelming Matrix stuff. The whole film looks like it was filmed on a set, and not a gorgeously wild set from the prequels, but the interchangeable corridors of the MCU. For all his faults, Abrams at least understood the importance of landscapes in Star Wars.

I think Rian was mostly interested in making a criticism of Star Wars itself, and all other components are secondary.

 

@godisawesome

Very astute. Good points that you raise/explain. I tend to agree with a lot of what you wrote here.

Something to consider though:

What inspires creators to make a Star Wars film v. What do fans love about Star Wars?

For Lucas, it seems like Star Wars has always been his opportunity to....
- Merge space opera and mythology to connect/communicate morals to our modern world.
- Innovate new/groundbreaking film technology.

My suspicion is that Rian Johnson (as a fan) loves Star Wars much more for the characters and the Joseph Campbell aspects than for the world building and the technical innovations, etc.

Therefore, RJ put A LOT more focus on the nuances of characters and archetypes than Lucas* might have. I mean, there are parts of TLJ that almost seem like a character study piece compared to how briskly and on the nose TPM and AOTC speeds through what characters are feeling/thinking and what/how actors are emoting.

*Lucas famously has never been an actor's director and seems interested in Star Wars characters primarily as archetypes that advance the plot rather than you know, realistic people.

So, for better or worse, we get a dichotomy between the PT (more concerned with large picture, world building, events, and film technology) and the ST (more concerned with a small group of characters and their interactions).

I would argue that both the PT and ST are imbalanced in their own ways, and that it still the OT that most perfectly balances these two different approaches. Yet, different fans like SW for different reasons, therefore we are all over the board in terms of how we love, rank, speak of, watch these films.

 

Not unable to, but I think harder to continue the story of TLJ and TFA together, conclude the events of the trilogy and tell a new interesting story.

 

'Always un motion is the future'. In the film, we see Kylo rising after Snoke screams 'you failed!' And then Rey: you will not bow before Snoke. So, somehow his desire and her hope created a 'shape'.

With Kylo, it's different. He doesn't see a shape. Rather, a few snapshots, like the ones Rey sees in TROS when Kylo touches Vader's helmet. There are 3 elements, it seems: filthy junk traders, drinking money, pauper's grave in Jakku.
Then Kylo wrote Rey Nobody's story. But, rather, those snapshots emerged because that's what he thought about Rey in the first place. 'They threw you away like garbage'.
But those visual elements would have been related to Rey anyway. In TROS Kylo says 'I never lied to you. They were no one'. Ok: but Rey was not thrown away like garbage and was not sold, and the father was killed and we don't know about the mother. Before Kylo's eyes, elements and people related to Rey intersected. Someone was thrown away like garbage, and there was drinking money involved once, and someone was buried in a pauper's grave, but who or when or how, it's another story. (There might have been several people involved at different times) A story, I think, related to Ben/Kylo too, and maybe to Luke. 30 years is a lot of time.

This was also a part of Looper. Timelines from the past crossing and interfering each other (old Joe's wife timeline and young Joe's love interest, Sarah, for example) Kylo would have seen what he wanted to see, his own story projected into Rey. The thing is, there were materials related to Rey at his disposal; and he summoned them with his mind. Someone came from nothing, and was/chose to be nothing, and turned.

 

Going many different directions because it had to start from scratch. That is not good for the final film.