It Could Be Said #64 JJ Abrams vs Rian Johnson In The Fight of The Century!
Continuing his look at the Star Wars sequels, Will considers the mistakes made in The Force Awakens & The Last Jedi
To read the first part of our look at the Star Wars Sequels; Did George Lucas Ruin The Star Wars Sequels?, click here.
When we look at the sequel trilogy we did get, it’s worth highlighting what it absolutely got right; recruiting a great core cast of actors who audiences naturally liked. To me the peak of the sequels is the first trailer for The Last Jedi; I was genuinely happy to see Rey, Finn, Poe Dameron and Kylo Ren again, and intrigued to see what the future film had in store for them. Whatever criticism you could have about The Force Awakens those young actors really connected with general audiences despite some confused writing and growing toxicity online. The raw materials for pulling off the impossible were there, but some silly mistakes let them down.
Perhaps the consequences of those mistakes could best be highlighted by what was clearly a low moment; the exchange at the end of The Last Jedi where Poe awkwardly introduces himself to Rey. These are meant to be two thirds of the new trifecta and yet the trilogy is almost done by the time they’re finally meeting. Worse their whole reason for knowing each other is their friendship with Finn but neither character has been shown to know him all that well. This is a problem that goes back to The Force Awakens being a thinly veiled soft reboot of the series, therefore looking to mimic the original film’s story as closely as possible. That’s a good trick to make people like the first movie, but a poor foundation for telling a coherent story across three movies.
We’re All Going On A…Hero’s Journey
The film that ultimately becomes known as A New Hope is not built around a trifecta, but a singular hero; Luke Skywalker. All the other characters are designed to facilitate his hero’s journey:
R2D2’s footage of Princess Leia is his original motivation for the horny salt farmer to want go on a galactic adventure, and she then ultimately facilitates him joining The Rebel Alliance
Obi Won Kenobi explains to him the geopolitical situation, introduces him to The Force and encourages him to join him in going to rescue Princess Leia.
Han Solo and Chewbacca are his route off Tatooine and his muscle during the mission to rescue Leia
There is a version of Star Wars that we glimpse with early spin-offs like Splinter of the Mind's Eye where Han and Chewie are nowhere to be seen, Leia is defined by her royal status, and Luke is clearly the star of a recurring series of adventures against Darth Vader and the wider imperial forces. He truly is Flash Gordon. But Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher being so charismatic in their roles, and the prior example of Star Trek priming people to look for trifectas in American sci-fi, made the original film feel more like an ensemble than it really was.
The genius of A Empire Strikes Back was that it actually managed to take the cast it inherited and give them something to do by having Luke train with Yoda whilst everyone else goes to Cloud City. It did this without undermining Luke’s centrality to the narrative by revealing at the very end that he was Darth Vader’s son. But as Ford rightly saw that trick couldn’t be easily repeated, hence his pitch for Han be killed by Vader at the end of the film. That would surely have set up Luke rescuing Leia from Vader being a key part of the third film’s climax. Instead Leia ends up alongside Han at Jabba the Hut’s lair, to be rescued by Luke in The Return of the Jedi’s opening stanza. They then infamously fade into the background, gamely cosplaying as Lawrence of Arabia to the Ewoks’ anti-colonial insurgency to the Death Star’s Western Front.
The problem this created for the sequel trilogy is that if you take your mission as recreating the original films you are being asked to do two different things; create an ensemble cast that adheres to fans memories of the original films’s trifecta, and create a leading star that replicates Luke’s actual starring role. And of course you also have to fit in the legacy cast that will lend the series credibility in the eyes of older fans.
Worse, when developing The Force Awakens JJ Abrams clearly tried to mimic A New Hope whilst applying a twist to the formula, in that the starring cast majors in one legacy character and minors in another.
Rey is obviously Luke Skywalker in that they are the force-sensitive underdog hero from a desert planet that is swept up into the broader galactic civil war by the other characters. But she also has Han’s fundamental reluctance to get too involved in the broader political situation.
Poe Dameron is Han Solo in that they are the professional amongst the heroes. They’re confident, they’re accomplished and they know how to get things done. But unlike Han they are already committed to The Resistance when we meet them, which makes them a bit like Leia.
Finn is Princess Leia in that they witness the horror of The First Order, are the spur for Rey to get involved in the wider plot, and clearly have sexual chemistry with both the other leads. But he also resembles Luke in being far less wordly and accomplished than the other key cast members.
This was a good way to create characters that fans liked, but it did make the plot seem somewhat incoherent. Why is our hero constantly talking about how she just wants to get back home? Why is the rogueish gunslinger also the most committed to the hierarchy of The Resistance? Why is the guy at the heart of all developments something of a bumbling fool? I didn’t notice it at the time, but in retrospect the characters created in The Force Awakens don’t make any sense, and don’t hang together.
More than that there is another fundamental problem. It’s common and correct to mock George Lucas’s limitations as a writer but that ignores what a tremendous plotter he can be. Much is made about how Star Wars exists in the shadow of The Vietnam War, but one of the key ways Lucas’s scepticism of that conflict shapes the series is that he never takes it for granted that his hero would want to fight the evil empire. Instead, A New Hope goes to meticulous lengths to explain why Luke embraces the cause of The Rebel Alliance;
He’s bored and yearns for adventure
He sees that Princess Leia is hot and wants to…meet her
He learns from Kenobi that his father fought against The Empire and that Darth Vader killled him
Imperial Forces kill his step-family and destroy their home, so leaving him no choice but to go with Kenobi
During their travel time Kenobi shows him the amazing things that the force can do and helps him repeat them
Arriving in the middle of an asteroid belt that was Alderaan lets him see how evil The Empire is for himself
He sees Darth Vader kill Kenobi, so giving him a personal rivalry with one of the most senior Imperial figures.
He meets loads of great people in The Rebel Alliance’s base, that further enthuses him in the importance of the rebel’s cause.
Lucas makes sure we understand why Luke has to, and wants to, fight The Empire. He would keep doing that with the news of his parentage being counterbalanced by Vader chopping his hand off and kidnapping someone who had been clearly established as his friend. Neither Abrams nor Johnson do that for their cast. Take Rey as the nominal lead for example:
Scavenging on Jakku, seemingly waiting for her family to return, but clearly not hating her life
Bumps into BB-8 and lets the droid hang out with her
Is offered a significant amount of money for BB-8 but refuses to sell it
Bumps into Finn, gets into an argument with him, ends up running onto the Millennium Falcon with him to escape The First Order
Let’s stop it there. You can surely start to see the problem. If Rey is happy living as a scavenger on Jakku, why would we root for her to leave her life? Why would she just become friends with a droid that she seemingly has no use for, when she would become responsible for keeping it charged? Why would she reject money for it when selling stuff she finds was her living, she was clearly desperate and the droid had done nothing to earn her loyalty? Why would she help Finn when she didn’t know him, didn’t initially like him, or share the cause he pretends to represent? This sloppy characterisation was prevalent throughout The Force Awakens, hidden by the fact the dialogue was so much more polished than the previous movies in the series, and the story was told at a far faster pace with more visceral action.
From Too Few Ideas, To Too Many
The situation was still salvageable going into The Last Jedi as long as the films could take the thinly drawn but likeable cast it inherited from Abrams and develop them and their related mystery boxes into something more substantial, thereby establishing a clear path for the third film. Somehow the quality of Rian Johnson’s film has become one of the most politically charged debates in the history of the internet, which is impressive given it came out at the height of Donald Trump’s first term and the Brexit psychodrama, so it was not like we were all short of things to argue about online.
My stance on the film has always been slightly unusual in that I think the film had the makings of something great but threw it away in the final third. The story of Luke’s alienation from The Jedi and how that undermines his ability to act as a mentor to first Kylo Ren and then Rey is a great story that weaves together the events of the previous two trilogies into a coherent whole. Kylo Ren exploiting Rey’s disillusionment with Luke to seduce her into helping him overthrow Snoke led to the most stylish bit of pure cinema the franchise had seen since Luke squared off against Vader in the second Death Star’s throne room. And then you had Poe become increasingly frustrated with what he saw as the diffident leadership of The Resistance, to the point that he stages a coup.
Here was the moment of maximum possibility for the sequels. If The Last Jedi had ended with Poe as Generalissmo of a more militarisitic resistance, Rey considering whether to form a “grey jedi” alliance with Kylo Ren, and Luke still alive on his island pondering his next move, the franchise would be cooking with gas. That’s three tremendous hooks to pick up in the final film, which can be spun out in any number of ways. They also do pick up themes present in The Force Awakens; it is after all Abrams who sent Luke into exile, directed the scenes where Kylo Ren and Rey’s chemistry was first demonstrated, and gave Star Wars its first leading character who was both gun-happy and a committed revolutionary.
Alas, someone in The Last Jedi’s production was seemingly unaware that the middle film of a trilogy should leave things on a cliffhanger! The last third of the film bizarrely rushes through an entire film’s worth of plot developments to bring things to a definitive ending. By the end of the film, Leia is once again the unquestioned leader of The Resistance, Kylo Ren and Rey are confirmed as the unquestioned champions of the Dark and Light sides of The Force with Luke joining Snoke in the choir invisible, and Kylo Ren also assumes control of The First Order. Meanwhile, The Resistance is seemingly reduced to a handful of troops all concentrated on one planet. It is Star Wars reduced to the Saturday Morning Cartoon version of the concept.
Now maybe Johnson was trying to make a point with this ending. That as Finn & Rose’s mission to Canto Bight highlighted, both sides are unwittingly in a symbiotic relationship with the Galaxy’s military-industrial complex. Maybe the whole point of the ending of The Last Jedi is that the two legacy factions are exhausted in terms of both ideas and personnel, and a new generation (as represented at the film’s end by the young boy who uses The Force whilst sweeping the yard) needs to replace them both with a new popular uprising. But that was just not a story the franchise was set up to tell given the investment made in establishing the new cast and their being only one film left to wrap up the trilogy. Having sensationally caught the hospital pass he had been thrown by Abrams, Johnson proceeded to throw the ball just as awkwardly to whoever would direct the third film.
That by The Last Jedi was released to a mixed reaction we no longer knew who would direct its sequel due to Colin Trevorrow having left the project a few months before, shows the true source of the problems were neither JJ Abrams or Rian Johnson, but the people employing them.
As we will explore last in the final part of our look into The Star Wars Sequels, it was a failure to properly plan and manage the sequels that doomed them.