Rian Johnson still hopes to make his Star Wars trilogy someday, which seems optimistic
Johnson's spin-off trilogy was announced before The Last Jedi came out
Aux News Rian Johnson
Rian Johnson’s first Knives Out sequel, Glass Onion, is coming to Netflix on December 23 (and some theaters around the country on November 23 for a few days), and another Knives Out sequel will be coming out some point after that to complete Netflix’s very expensive Knives Out Trilogy, but that doesn’t mean Johnson has stopped thinking about the other trilogy he’s been cooking.
We’re talking about Star Wars, as we often are, with Variety taking a moment during its Awards Circuit Podcast recently to ask Johnson about Star Wars. Johnson’s trilogy of Star Wars spin-offs was announced even before The Last Jedi—a perfect film that Johnson said he’s “even more proud” of these days—came out, but that was years ago, so Variety asked if it’s ever going to happen. Johnson said “God I hope so” to the direct question about whether it will get made, which doesn’t instill much hope, but he did say that he has “talked to” Lucasfilm boss Kathleen Kennedy about it and they’re “still talking about it.” Still, he doesn’t think he’d be able to get to it until after he makes his third Knives Out movie, whenever that will be, so it seems somewhat likely that it will just keep getting bumped further and further into the future.
After all, we’re talking about a whole new trilogy in a series that hasn’t released a new movie in a while, and the trilogy would feature “new characters from a corner of the galaxy that Star Wars lore has never explored,” so that all sounds like a lot of work. This isn’t the kind of thing he can just throw together in a weekend. That being said, if he has some free time this weekend and he feels like making another Star Wars, we’d be onboard with it.
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I would bet 100000000000 dollars it will never happen
On one hand, it’s too bad we won’t get to see it. The Last Jedi might be my favorite Star Wars movie.
On the other, it’s Star Wars. It’s a movie series for children and I’m way past the point of caring. There’s no point in hoping that someone will come into the franchise and make an interesting and more mature story, when I can just watch something that’s not for children. I’m looking forward to Glass Onion, and both us and Johnson are better served with him making his own original movies.
“ It’s a movie series for children”Nope , its suitable for children , but its supposed to be , at the very least a family friendly movie series. That’s not the same as ‘for children’.
I like the Last Jedi but my problem with Star Wars now is the exact opposite of yours.It’s completely being made for 30 year olds and not for teens and tweens anymore.And I’m over that. There’s no sense of hope or adventure. Or wonder and awe.
Watch Andor.
It looks dull.
It’s slow burn, but it’s not.
It’s not.
And/or what?
I prefer Xor.(Actually I just started watching Andor after asking if it’s worth it and hearing nothing but good things, only two episodes in but I like it so far.)
No. I don’t think you understood my post.
Even if this thing really is more mature, I don’t need to watch “the adult version of a children’s franchise”. There is more to life than IP. I can just engage with original things made for adults instead.
Your loss.
Literally everything you “engage” with is an IP.
No. I’m engaging with you right now and you’re not an IP. You’re a pedant pretending not to understand what I said.
There’s no need to engage with your lazy, self-important, “I don’t even own a television!”-style snobbery. We get it, you’re smarter/more sophisticated/more mature/more adult than we are because you don’t watch Star Wars. Happy now?
Pass.
the empty “The Last Jedi” was a fraud to its core.Straining so hard for praise, the cloying film – so precious and self-congratulatory – managed to hoodwink some people at least, but the dwindling audience managed to see through Johnson’s storytelling dead-ends.It may have been the kind of film when the critics are afraid to admit that they don’t like it, but audiences weren’t stupid.And it truly was annoying that people put onto his movie this sense of“well, here is a good Star Wars film because it isn’t a Star Wars film. This is a Rian Johnson film and it’s a good film because what it’s attempting to do rather than what it actually achieves.”That’s such a condescending attitude: apparently, all this movie had to do was to conceptually go against the grain of the genre that we’re going to pretend to like it and treat it like a monument of cinema.People line up around the block to knock the Nolan Batman films for being self-serious and then in the same breath will be like “The Last Jedi – THAT is a movie.”Nolan worked within a genre without despising it and those who like it and audiences respect that. They respond to stories worth telling and characters that they care about. People aren’t invested in propagating a filmmaker’s talking points and that’s why they didn’t buy into the critical hype of a grifter.
If this did happen , either set in in the far past or far future of the Star Wars universe, the problems I have with TLJ were mostly down to it derailing the story the trilogy seemed to be trying to tell . If he has his own sandbox to play in , he can really let loose.
But is letting him lose really a good thing? The guy’s films all (the ones I’ve seen at least) have some pretty big plot holes and the one time he was hired to participate in a collaborative trilogy, he basically did his own thing entirely, doing the bare minimum to connect it to the previous film and leaving whoever came after him with the film equivalent of a smashed set of Legos because everything established in the first film was gone.
I mean, Knives Out blatantly gave away it’s killer early in the film with the grandmother. I think the ensemble cast and primary role in the career of the actor prevents people from fully making the connection. Everyone acted well even if someone’s accent was… so forced it hurt.
Plus whoever decided what medications to use for the murder when writing the film had no idea how either medication works (Morphine effects are near-instant), what the bottles they’d be in were actually like (Toradol bottles are brown because light basically kills its effectiveness), or how a nurse with as much experience as the lady had would handle the medication, symptoms and overdoses.
I had worked with Morphine and Ketolorac (brand name Toradol) for years and from the moment the film was anchored around somehow mixing the two up, it lost me because as you said, people (espcially the recipient) would immediately know. That plus you’d never use them like this to manage chronic pain anyway.I’ve never gotten the appeal of this film. More a multitude of other reasons (including helping cover up Plummer’s death regardless of why, Arnas wouldn’t have seen a cent of that money after any half decent legal team had finished with her), of the 30 or so films I saw at the cinema in 2019, it was easily the worst by far (and I saw both Dark Phoenix *and* Dark Fate).
I think people are enamored with the concept of the film and the cast. It runs on the same formula as the Agatha Christie film adaptations/remakes (Which I believe are successful but haven’t actually checked) where they just bring in a bunch of famous people for a now stereotypical murder mystery but can be considered ‘new’. Also there seem to be people who ignore the ending, think Marta did it on purpose and that the Detective is just a massive idiot… which honestly isn’t a bad take either considering how useless he was until the end.
Though personally, I think that crazy knife collection that was in the end scenes should’ve been the focus of the film and source of the murder mystery. Instead it was just sorta… there to justify the film title in the most basic sense.
I think it’s funny when people assume the only reason someone could like something that they don’t is because those other people are morons.
While that is not the message I intended to portray, I can see how you’d think that. I was more commenting on how people rave on the film like it is something made by a genius of cinema. People, particularly vocal Johnson fans, seem to treat the film like it is perfect. Similar things happen with the films of Edgar Wright, Darron Aronofsky, Wes Anderson, and Alex Garland, where the director’s name being on something automatically makes it the best thing since sliced bread.
I enjoyed watching Knives Out because of the cast. I found the actual mystery and mechanics behind said mystery to be a mess. To me, it was a flawed story where stylistic choices hide some pretty baffling decisions in the script.
The trilogy “wasn’t trying” to tell any kind of story in Force Awakens other than a derivative story that hewed as close to ANH as possible. Even the writers/director admitted they weren’t thinking of any kind of plan beyond that one movie and had no clue how the rest of the trilogy was going to play out.They were one-and-done (until Abrams was brought back at the 11th hour to do episode 9.) All this talk of “derailing the plan” is utterly fanciful. There was no plan, no direction whatsoever. Literally. Nor did the text itself point to anything, either. I’d love to hear what this imagined “original plan” was supposed to be that Rian apparently ruined.
According to Daisy Ridley, there were plans that were scrapped.“Here’s what I think I know. J. J. wrote Episode VII, as well as drafts for VIII & IX. Then Rian Johnson arrived and wrote TLJ entirely … I believe Rian didn’t keep anything from the first draft of Episode VIII.”Johnson seemed to have carte blanche to do as he pleased prior to meeting the previous creative team or even getting a buy-in from the actors involved, given their reactions to the script.Here is what we know of earlier plans.- According to Boyega, Finn would have become a force user. That was rejected so he go to a Casino Planet in a plot that went nowhere. Johnson had totally dismantled Finn and pushed the Ren-Rey romantic relationship as the key one in this trilogy. Johnson admitted that he saw Rey and Kylo in TFA as the beginning of a “romantic” and “intimate” dynamic.- According to The Art of The Rise of Skywalker book, Leia would have been attempting to gather allies for a resistance but come up to anger from other systems due to her lineage. This was an overaching Arndt idea that 100% makes sense and would have pulled links between the earlier films together … instead of her being in a coma so that Poe learns to stop being a toxic male … a trait totally absent in VII.- VII originally had Luke using the force to levitate rocks when Rey arrived …Johnson specifically asked for that to be removed and for Luke to not use the force, as it did not fit with his own plans. There are a million reasons why Luke could have been there (waiting for someone to train, experimenting in the force) that could have created an arc for Luke that was dark but emotionally true to the character of the original trilogy.- Palpatine was something that feels like one of the only options to finish up the trilogy without needing to create and kill off a totally new baddy in one movie; a mistake Johnson also made in the treatment of Snoke.- Lucas’s story treatments, which had a mysterious mastermind character named Uber. But after Abrams left Lucasfilm for a bit and his outlines were discarded by Rian Johnson, the vision he (and the tie-in material written before TFA) was setting up was derailed in favor of Kylo Ren becoming the big bad in Episode IX.- The irony is that VII left Kylo in a better spot to eventually become a big bad over two movies: he killed not one but two father figures, he is totally rejected by Rey, is physically scarred and he is rescued by his erstwhile nemesis Hux. There was room for him to grow villainous. Driver said that the original conception of the character was to start vulnerable and become more emotionally closed off and more powerful as the series progressed. That’s what he was pitched by Abrams. By the end of VIII, however, he is embarrassed in front of two armies and is literally on his knees. VIII doesn’t even work as a set-up for IX by the film’s self-contained logic.All of this sounds 1000 times better than the ego-trip that was Johnson’s “The Last Jedi”.The fundamental issue was approving VIII.What was anyone thinking?
Again, there were no “scrapped” plans and Abrams most definitely did not write a draft of Episode 8. Period. It absolutely did not happen, full stop.
Except Driver, Ridley and Boyega have all discussed alternate plans and the only person who claimed otherwise is Johnson … a man of such honesty and integrity that his response to #MeToo was to delete his social media commentary. Why are you carrying this guy’s water? Seriously, there needs to be an intervention for people’s Rian Johnson complex. There is a weird desire for people to balance the scales and give his films a free pass. When you have these blinders on, you might not see a film for what it is. Please seek therapy or do anything other than submitting yourself to being an apologist for his terrible movies and giving them a good notice.
They wanted “Empire Strikes Back, but different, but the same.” They wanted Rey to be Luke, they wanted Luke to be Yoda, they wanted Snoke to be Palpatine; they wanted Rey to cut short her training so she could rush off to save her friends, etc…but emphatically not in the way that Johnson gave them essentially that. In short, they’re incapable of expressing what they really wanted, which is “a perfect recreation of what it felt like to watch ESB for the first time when I was 8,” so they resort to vague gripes about Johnson disrespecting the source material or blowing up Abrams’s (nonexistent) plan or whatever. I think there are plenty of legitimate criticisms to be made about TLJ, but the complaint that Johnson “changed everything for the sake of changing things” is nonsensical.
It’s insane to think that the Lucasfilm execs and story group, who fired Solo’s directors mid-movie, just let Rian do whatever he wanted and completely trash the trilogy in the process.It’s honestly a more ridiculous theory than “they’re going to completely retcon the sequel trilogy”
Johnson didn’t “trash” anything. Johnson elevated a mediocre first outing into the only actually quality entry in the misbegotten trilogy. There were no plans that he changed, nothing was in the works. Zippo.
Yah I know. My point is it’s insane to believe that’s what happened, as some people do
I see.
Johnson didn’t “trash” anything. Johnson elevated a mediocre first outing into the only actually quality entry in the misbegotten trilogy. There were no plans that he changed, nothing was in the works. Zippo.
What story did you think the trilogy was trying to tell? Force Awakens was a retelling of A New Hope. Where was that story headed???
What a load of shit. If he wanted to and Disney wanted to, he would’ve pursued it, signed a contract, written drafts. Instead he signed deals with their competitors to occupy him for years that have passed and many more years to come. The rest is just noise.
Or, hear me out: sometimes you have to be diplomatic.
Or, hear me out, a director can want to do more than one thing at a time and making deals and making films with multiple studios is just what successful people do.
Personally if I were a working director in Hollywood I’d simply publicly back out of a possible three film deal with Disney.
Man, good luck trying to explain the concept of “being diplomatic” to Milligna.
“I got yer diplomacy…right here, pal!”
I didn’t like The Last Jedi (stay with me for just a moment) because I didn’t like Rian’s directorial approach of changing everything simply for the sake of changing it. You don’t do that in the middle of a story. HOWEVER, I was looking forward to seeing what he would do when he had control over an entire trilogy. (My biggest issue with the entire new trilogy was a clear lack of a singular vision) THAT’S when you start trying new things and trying to shake things up. So while I might not have enjoyed his first attempt at the franchise, it’s still disappointing he won’t have a chance prove us all wrong with his own project.
It’s annoying that not liking The Last Jedi means people assume you don’t like it because it had a diverse cast as opposed to the fact it was nonsensical and made established characters act out of character. But there was a *good* Star Wars movie with a diverse cast — it was called Rogue One! And featuring nearly all new characters there was no issue with mischaracterizations. Which is what Star Wars movies should be — explore the stories other than Skywalkers and company.
I think in general people assume that you don’t like it because it doesn’t line up to your image of Star Wars and your conception of its characters – which can certainly be confusing at times to those of us for whom it lines up extremely well to our image of Star Wars and our conception of its characters. It’s only when someone starts to describe it as woke PC garbage that most people will assume that the objections are about diversity.
Nope. People jump to “you just hate women” pretty quickly.
No, that’s why people hate Force Awakens.
I feel like after TLJ came out (and especially TRoS), everyone retroactively hated Force Awakens.
TFA was always a too-safe rehash of ANH with too much fan service and too little attention paid to its ostensible protagonists. It’s just that a lot of people–me included–were willing to grade it on a nostalgia-tinged “first decent Star Wars movie in 30 years” curve that they’re less willing to apply now that they’ve seen the whole trilogy.
Can’t I hate women and not like a movie?
Are you sure that’s not just a vocal minority?
Probably. But these days we treat every vocal minority as an existential force.
Agreed. MOST people didn’t like The Last Jedi because it wasn’t a carbon copy of previous Star Wars stuff.I – someone who assumes about 40% of the country is racist af – don’t assume that diversity is someone’s Last Jedi complaint until they say it out loud.
I dunno, while Rogue One’s acting was good, Jeyn was a pretty bad protagonist. We’re giving lists of her skills and achievements before her introduction and she just winds up being a pretty mediocre character forced into a pretty basic role that somehow boils down to “Daddy issues” like nearly every other Star Wars protagonist. Forest Whitaker’s character was much the same, where he came off more of a cameo than an actual character like he was in Black Panther. By the end I got the feeling that I was just watching a Star Wars version of Seven Samurai/The Magnificent Seven (which turned out better than Denzel’s remake).
Nah, we assume you didn’t like because you’re small-minded and have a poorly-developed sense of drama.But, hey, a lot of people didn’t like it because of racism, too!
Kylo ends TFA scarred, having murdered a couple of father figures and totally rejected by Rey.He starts TLJ with his shirt off and Rey making googly eyes at this school shooter.Alan Dean Foster has spoken about being instructed to undermine that relationship between Finn and Rey.“I expected to see that developed further in [‘The Last Jedi’]. And zero happened with it. And we all know why zero happened with it — and there’s no need to go into it in-depth — but that’s, sadly, just the way things are.”As Boyega said“I’m the only cast member whose experience of Star Wars was based on their race”Johnson had totally dismantled Finn and pushed the Ren-Rey romantic relationship as the key one in this trilogy.And can everyone please stop repeating his talking points. Johnson didn’t subvert expectations as much as clearly steal its plot wholesale from the recent “Battlestar Galactica”.- Opening the film with a chase was not a choice dictated by TFA. In fact, that film ends with the Resistance secure after a mission completed. Johnson’s plot point is stolen wholesale from the “Battlestar Galactica” miniseries. – TLJ opens with the Resistance in crisis mode and looking to escape the enemy with the ascension of an unknown leader. That’s the BSG pilot. – The inciting incident is the heroes realizing that the villains are tracking them. That’s BSG episode “33″. – That plot is resolved when the CO performs a one-in-a-million maneuver that uses the physics of space flight. That’s the conclusion of the New Caprica Arc.Honestly, I’d rather Johnson had just ripped off one episode and that’s it. By jumbling all these stories together, he’s failed to understand why Moore and co made these choices in the first place. Unlike the direct and powerful analogies of the TV show, there’s an emotional and psychological void to Johnson’s writing as he meanders from one clumsy story beat to another that are all ultimately unrewarding.
Rogue One is pretty boring until the third act.
People still angry-posting five years after the movie was
released whenever the words “The Last Jedi” appear on the Internet
aren’t being forced to do so, and plenty of people not liking it did so
because of the cast. And nobody forced you to post a comment here. But nobody seems to be posting that you’re a racist, either, so never mind.
I’ll
dismiss “nonsensical” on the grounds that Star Wars is all about
“nonsensical.” TFA is nonsensical; TRoS is a fever-dream of “what, now”
that wouldn’t even make sense as a CRPG. If you think “fighter combat in
space without inertia” is cool but “battleship combat in space without
inertia” is stupid, I don’t know what to tell you.As
for established characters: Han’s dead in TLJ. Leia reprimands someone
for disobeying a direct order, spends most of the movie in a coma, then
comes out and grabs a gun to shoot somebody. That all seems like Leia
things to do.And Luke: he gets to where he is by 1.
Impulsively overreacting to a Force vision, like in ESB; 2. Trying to
kill someone he should be trying to help (as with Vader in ESB and
RotJ); 3. Haring off to a remote planet when there’s a rebellion that
needs him (Dagobah in EBS, plus both Kenobi and Yoda from prequels to
original series); 4. Stubbornly clinging to his own rejection of the
Force until he learns better (ESB-Jedi, arguably). Maybe he reverts a
bit too far toward the whiny, petulant Luke we see mostly in ANH, but
that’s hardly a departure; your best argument here is that he hasn’t
changed ENOUGH from the original trilogy.I don’t think
any of the new characters are really “established” yet, but: Ren is an
anger-ridden, petulant man-child trying to live out a power fantasy who
thinks he deserves the girl just because; Poe is a mouthy fighter pilot;
Rey is a mysterious Force-linked girl-of-destiny who doesn’t actually
understand much of anything yet; Finn has almost no commitment to the
Resistance and joined mainly because the First Order attacked him and he
cares about Rey specifically. That all seems consistent here.
Going into the new trilogy, one of my major concerns was that none of the storytellers would be able to step back and look at the legacy characters objectively in order to tell fresh stories about them, but would instead be blinded by a sense of reverence (and, honestly, if you’d given me the budget and said “go make a new Star Wars trilogy,” I think I’d have had that exact problem). I was absolutely thrilled in TLJ to see a Luke who felt consistent with the character we knew from the OT, rather than an idealized version forged from childhood memories. To my mind, Luke’s emotional impulsivity is a central aspect of his character. I’ve had people argue that “he got over that” by the end of RotJ, but… that’s not really how people work? He’d mastered an incredible degree of control over it by the end of RotJ, for sure… which is why it would take something as big as seeing the nephew he has personally trained in the Force falling to the Dark Side to bring that quality back to the surface.
And you can take that to the bank. The Bank of Frank. Frank’s Bank.
The original trilogy changed things and shook things up significantly in the middle installment.
I’m with you on TLJ. It was like he didn’t want to make part of a trilogy at all and put more effort into a war profiteering subplot and subverting tropes than actually making the actions of the protagonists make sense. The film did have some great cinematography, particularly scenes like Huldo’s sacrifice looking straight out of a space opera anime.
The primary plot was essentially one long chase scene that felt like the script writers were big fans of Mad Max: Fury Road but not fans of writing coherent characters.All the plotlines converging in the end would’ve been great if they didn’t run entirely on the protagonists holding idiot balls so that Star Wars tropes could be subverted.
Rey and Kylo’s arc might as well have been a totally different film when you consider how she ignores time and distance to wind up in the same area as the rebels. Their arc is also the only one that seems to want to continue ideas set from the previous film. The movie made it seem like she barely spent a week training before wandering off to rescue a guy who didn’t want to be rescued by surrendering herself on Snoke’s personal ship and relying on the power of friendship with a guy she was just trying to straight up murder at the end of TFA.
Finn and Rose’s mission failed because of their initial parking and then the film used a Del Toro cameo to both provide instant plot continuance and go on an out of place rant about war profiteering and how there are no real heroes and villains, that ended with Del Toro’s character selling them out and getting a ton of people killed. Also, the film immediately negated Finn’s character growth from TFA and didn’t even bother to give him amnesia caused by his wounds. Rose was honestly the heart of their arc but dove into stupidity thanks to the writing setting Finn up for a grand sacrifice only for her to stop it. Rose’s actress definitely didn’t deserve the abuse she got on social media.
Phasma was just wasted entirely, even after the tie-in comics between films went hard to make her a super-badass of Comic Boba Fett proportions. The damage Finn did to her armor shouldn’t have even happened given that her armor was supposed to be plated with starship-level armor giving it the shine.
Poe was just… Huldo fuel I guess? His arc was nonsense that involved getting a bunch of people killed to get rid of one ship when he knew they had entire fleets and then a mutiny that turned out to only cause more people to get killed. Huldo was a cameo with one of the best deaths in the franchise.
Hux got turned into a total joke of a character when he actually had potential. RoS would double down on that.
Snoke managed to describe his own death in a monologue and do nothing but troll Hux, Kylo, and Rey the entire film after seeming like an actual menacing Sith/Wizard of Oz in the TFA.
Leia was probably the only person in the film who wasn’t a complete idiot and she spent most of the film in a coma before casually ending a mutiny.
You lost me at “one long chase scene”. This is a critique that I find strange, because it was so clearly not a chase scene, it was a siege. During a siege, you can wait out your enemy who is behind a wall to starve them of resources. Them catapulting explosives at the walls just to “remind them that we’re here” and the people hiding behind the walls finding a way to sneak out… The whole setup is so clearly a siege, so when people describe it as a boring chase scene, it’s hard to take the criticism too seriously. It culminates in them hiding behind a giant wall while they wheel out a giant death star laser battering ram. This is all siege imagery.
You’re describing the final act. When most people refer to TLJ as a long chase scene (which, look, I disagree with too; chase scenes are exciting) they’re talking about the majority of the movie that takes place before Holdo lightspeeds through the First Order fleet.
The siege only occurs at the end when the chase scene is over and their plan to trick the First Order fails because of Del Toro. So yes, there is a siege scene too that takes up the remaining time once Snoke is slain.
After Poe gets all of the Rebel offense killed taking out a single ship, the movie transitions to a giant chase sequence that lasts long enough for Rey, Finn/Rose, and Poe’s storylines to unfold. The rebels slowly lose people as their ships run out of fuel. Finn and Rose even manage to get into another chase sequence in the casino before they’re captured.
“I didn’t like The Last Jedi (stay with me for just a moment) because I
didn’t like Rian’s directorial approach of changing everything simply
for the sake of changing it.”Good thing he did absolutely nothing like that.
But I’d love to hear your examples.
The empty “The Last Jedi” was a fraud to its core.Straining so hard for praise, the cloying film – so precious and self-congratulatory – managed to hoodwink some people at least, but the dwindling audience managed to see through Johnson’s storytelling dead-ends. It may have been the kind of film when the critics are afraid to admit that they don’t like it, but audiences weren’t stupid. And it truly was annoying that people put onto his movie this sense of “well, here is a good Star Wars film because it isn’t a Star Wars film. This is a Rian Johnson film and it’s a good film because what it’s attempting to do rather than what it actually achieves.” That’s such a condescending attitude: apparently, all this movie had to do was to conceptually go against the grain of the genre that we’re going to pretend to like it and treat it like a monument of cinema. People line up around the block to knock the Nolan Batman films for being self-serious and then in the same breath will be like “The Last Jedi – THAT is a movie.” Nolan worked within a genre without despising it and those who like it and audiences respect that. They respond to stories worth telling and characters that they care about. People aren’t invested in propagating a filmmaker’s talking points and that’s why they didn’t buy into the critical hype of a grifter.
I’m not sure what Johnson changed, exactly. By my recollection he changed very little; Abrams set up a bunch of stuff with no intention of paying it off himself (which is kind of how he writes everything) and left it to the next guy to resolve those plotlines. Well, Johnson did what he was hired to do and resolved them. And then he set up some plotlines for the next guy (who at the time he thought would be Colin Trevorow) to resolve afterward.
It was a terrible way to write a trilogy, but it seems to me like Johnson did exactly what he was supposed to do given his position.
If anything, when Abrams came back and did Rise of Skywalker, it was him (or more likely, a bunch of nervous Disney execs who take Twitter too seriously) changing everything and retconning in new endings to storylines which Johnson had already resolved.
According to Daisy Ridley, there were plans that were scrapped.“Here’s what I think I know. J. J. wrote Episode VII, as well as drafts for VIII & IX. Then Rian Johnson arrived and wrote TLJ entirely … I believe Rian didn’t keep anything from the first draft of Episode VIII.”Johnson seemed to have carte blanche to do as he pleased prior to meeting the previous creative team or even getting a buy-in from the actors involved, given their reactions to the script.Here is what we know of earlier plans.- According to Boyega, Finn would have become a force user. That was rejected so he go to a Casino Planet in a plot that went nowhere. Johnson had totally dismantled Finn and pushed the Ren-Rey romantic relationship as the key one in this trilogy. Johnson admitted that he saw Rey and Kylo in TFA as the beginning of a “romantic” and “intimate” dynamic. – According to The Art of The Rise of Skywalker book, Leia would have been attempting to gather allies for a resistance but come up to anger from other systems due to her lineage. This was an overaching Arndt idea that 100% makes sense and would have pulled links between the earlier films together … instead of her being in a coma so that Poe learns to stop being a toxic male … a trait totally absent in VII.- VII originally had Luke using the force to levitate rocks when Rey arrived …Johnson specifically asked for that to be removed and for Luke to not use the force, as it did not fit with his own plans. There are a million reasons why Luke could have been there (waiting for someone to train, experimenting in the force) that could have created an arc for Luke that was dark but emotionally true to the character of the original trilogy.- Palpatine was something that feels like one of the only options to finish up the trilogy without needing to create and kill off a totally new baddy in one movie; a mistake Johnson also made in the treatment of Snoke.- Lucas’s story treatments, which had a mysterious mastermind character named Uber. But after Abrams left Lucasfilm for a bit and his outlines were discarded by Rian Johnson, the vision he (and the tie-in material written before TFA) was setting up was derailed in favor of Kylo Ren becoming the big bad in Episode IX.- The irony is that VII left Kylo in a better spot to eventually become a big bad over two movies: he killed not one but two father figures, he is totally rejected by Rey, is physically scarred and he is rescued by his erstwhile nemesis Hux. There was room for him to grow villainous. Driver said that the original conception of the character was to start vulnerable and become more emotionally closed off and more powerful as the series progressed. That’s what he was pitched by Abrams. By the end of VIII, however, he is embarrassed in front of two armies and is literally on his knees. VIII doesn’t even work as a set-up for IX by the film’s self-contained logic.All of this sounds 1000 times better than the ego-trip that was Johnson’s “The Last Jedi”.The fundamental issue was approving VIII.What was anyone thinking?
“Rian Johnson changed everything!” = “Rian Johnson didn’t adhere to my nebulous idea of what was supposed to happen after the first movie!” Abrams gave Johnson a STOCK STAR WARS PROTAGONIST, a STOCK STAR WARS SIDEKICK, a STOCK STAR WARS ROGUE TYPE, a STOCK STAR WARS WACKY DROID, and a STOCK STAR WARS EVIL EMPEROR. These weren’t “characters” so much as [INSERT CHARACTERS HERE]—Abrams could have given them some character development but they were too busy being audience surrogates and gawking at “oh look it’s Han and Chewie in another Star War!” What is there to change when there’s no “there” there in the first place? Abrams’s only remotely original contribution was Kylo Ren, whom Johnson clearly enjoyed so much that he was setting Ren up to be the primary antagonist of the series.
The middle of the story is exactly where you change things. It’s called a twist, or a development.
I like The Last Jedi.I don’t think I would have, though, if it wasn’t a Star Wars movie.There are plot holes, setpieces that strain all manner of credibility even in a fantasy universe, and a couple of moments where Johnson was clearly too far inside his own head. And the less said about Leia Poppins, the better.But I will say this – Johnson tried to expand the limits of the Star Wars universe as much as he could within a very strict corporate mandate. It was a bold thrust and an attempt to break the narrative rails that the franchise was stuck riding. That’s what I like most about the movie, and why I have really enjoyed Andor and not so much Book of Boba Fett, Obi-Wan Kenobi, or the later stages of The Mandalorian.
I hope he still gets to make his trilogy, and I’m saying that as someone who wasn’t a huge fan of TLJ.(He’s great director and that movie was perfectly as a stand-alone, just not in context of being the middle part of a larger saga. One of the biggest issues the Sequel Trilogy had was being too disjointed from episode to episode, it would have probably been a lot better if all the movies had the same creative/directing team across all the movies).
The Last Jedi is the second best Star Wars movie ever from my perspective, but I’d rather he make any three movies than three Star Wars movies.
hard pass.good luck with the Plastic Pear or whatever the fuck though
Johnson (and Star Wars) needs to get away from the idea of doing a “trilogy.”Most trilogies are bad. Most are one good movie and then some hastily conceived sequels. Or they’re just the same thing repeated to diminishing returns. Or they’re one long story stretched out unnecessarily.In the case of a Johnson SW movie, it would probably be the latter.Take the Lucas approach: Focus on making one good movie that stands on its own. If it works and people like it, expand the story and make more. Have some ideas of where it could go, but don’t restrict yourself to the idea of having to have all three movies to tell one story.Or, better yet, make a TV show. It’ll give you the big storytelling canvas you want, but in a way that feels more natural and organic.
I’m one of the biggest Star Wars fans you’ll ever meet, and I can say without hesitation that Star Wars doesn’t deserve Rian Johnson.
Last Jedi had it’s issues. I wasn’t wild about the Casino side-trip or really anything about Benicio del Toro’s role, but it was still, by far, the best, most artistically accomplished film of the sequel trilogy. Johnson swung big and made a big, beautiful, imperfect film. I would love to see what he could do with a fresh story, without the weight of expectations that sank Last Jedi, but there will still be a loud corner of “fans” who will shriek no matter what he delivers.
Welcome to my totally unrelated spin-off:
More Stuff The Skywalkers Did On Tattooine
Episode 17: Luke Visits The HyperDentist
“Hi, I’m Luke Skywalker. Can you direct me to the natatorium as I am attending a swim meet? Thank you, I’m Luke Skywalker.”
I don’t care what the nerds say.. The Last Jedi was the only Star Wars movie since Empire Strikes Backthat even TRIED to do something interesting. (Maybe Rougue One). I’d rather watch another 10 attempts that don’t land to everyone’s satisfaction than more fanservice/protect the IP crap.
Don’t need. Just give me more Andor.
I like Rian’s other projects but the TLJ was my least favourite SW film. I would honestly rather watch Jar Jar twerk on repeat than go through watching that (or any of the Sequel Trilogy films) again. Aside from the flippant treatment of its OG characters (which has already been well-hashed out by many critics) and Disney’s overall near-complete disregard for Legends (EU) material (a lot of which was much better than anything Disney could ever come up with IMO), I just thought the film was so damned GOOFY. Forget all the nuanced problems; what about the one glaring you in the face: that film was so Disneyfied it felt like Jim Henson had sex with Mickey Mouse and then was handed the proverbial wheel. If you pitched TLJ and said “imagine Crystal Foxes, Angsty youth, and constant cheesy one-liners that sounded like a fourteen year old wrote them”, I’d think you were pitching a sequel to Labyrinth or a new superhero flick for CW, not Star Wars. But no one brought up that very, very basic fact. Instead they were all horny over this and that slight to tradition (which is a fair criticism from a self-proclaimed SW nerd’s POV) but that’s like complaining the microwave cooks unevenly when the house is flooding. I don’t necessarily think this is Rian’s fault, as someone else handed him that dumpster fire of a script, but he could have at least wiped his ass with it, not proceed to produce it. God, what I would give to see Kathleen Kennedy’s face if someone did that in front of her. Nope, Rian should stick with Knives Out, stay far, far away in another galaxy. Even George Lucas’s wife hates the Disney trilogy. That says something.