Burt really hit the nail on the head with this. The fundamental problem is maybe they shouldn’t have taken the story in a direction that only allows the characters to react in ways that make them “bitter and crushed by grief,” you know?

OK way to make my reply obsolete you piece of shit

He does have some really clever posts in the SW forum. Gets to the point very succinctly.

I'm open to that, but I have no major issue with what they ended up doing. War is devastating, and it seems to me that Star Wars is about... a really long war. TLJ takes it in an interesting direction that I was not anticipating from TFA, an exploration of the nature of folk heroes and the slow, grass-roots rise of a new insurgency

But it’s all built on a flawed foundation because the war ended in ROTJ. So they just restarted it in the least imaginative way possible. I also got no depth or nuance out of how Johnson explored any of those themes.

Yes, the war was always supposed to end in ROTJ, and any expanded universe book that said otherwise, was quickly discarded by Lucas. It was not the end of time though, so there are many ways they could have continued the story.

I think I've come to terms with that after the initial dissonance from the opening of TFA. This is an issue with how they chose to restart the franchise, which is essentially "hey BTW the good guys didn't actually win win." Your issues with the film's exploration of themes are fair, but I found it very deft while remaining surface-level enough for a family film

Luke isn’t reacting to events in TFA. AT ALL.

he’s reactibg to things that have happened long before. When he failed Ben and lost his academy.

His story and character in TLJ has nothing at all to do with what happens in TFA.

I said “events established by TFA” essentially referring to all the dumb events that happened between ROTJ and TFA

The Star Wars episode of the toys that made us, on Netflix.

There are no such events referenced at all. We know nothing about Luke even now other than he had an academy and it went tits up. One event in 30 years.

That’s not dumb. That’s a natural logical extension of what we expected his character to do after ROTJ and it’s scant at best.

but it is not an arbitrary and capricious decision. It is a perfectly reasonable reaction to the offscreen events (that are detailed in the course of the two movies), and one he works through in the course of the film's narrative.

Yes but the narrative is dumb and inherently contradicts the themes of the OT

No such events referenced? What? I’m talking about the Order and his academy and all those dumb events

It contradicts nothing thematically (that I can think of)The OT states that the rebels won a major victory and Luke redeemed his father. It is easy enough to imply that the war ended but it’s never stated (and that the EU immediately picks up with the war shows that this is a logical follow up). If Episode VII followed 3 year’s later I doubt we would bat an eye. It’s the thirty year gap that ossified that impression


This criticism is not unlike saying LOTR never should have happened because it’s existence undermines the history of the second age (that’s for you, Dime).

Platt is right. The new trilogy (and the prequels, actually) reframe the OT as part of one long multigenerational war. Which is awesome

Sick em Stip. attaboy

Let's look at the themes of the OT.

In my view, the whole trilogy is about overcoming. Evolving. Transcending. It's about hope. Change. Possibility. Becoming a better person. Redeeming your flaws. Fighting for what's right. The end of ROTJ gives a beautiful, thematically and emotionally meaningful catharsis to this thematic arc. The war was always metaphorical for what was happening with the characters. It ended when their arcs reached their thematic and personal conclusion.

Coming in later and effectively undoing their ultimate victory and resetting the war for narrative purposes essentially destroys the meaning of the entire arc. By destroying that hope for catharsis that was so vital to the OT, you destroy everything that made SW a meaningful franchise.

Approaching the end of ROTJ with the absurdly literal rationale of "It is easy enough to imply that the war ended but it’s never stated," strikes me as so ridiculously dense and obtuse that I almost wonder how anyone who thinks that could understand any art ever beyond the most basic level of plot. What the fuck more do you need ROTJ to do to explain to you that the war is over other than a massive victory party that concludes the thematic arcs of every character, whose internal struggles have been externalized through this war for three movies? Do you need to watch the Empire and Rebels sign a fucking cease-fire agreement?

Amazing. Every word in that post was wrong.

So shocked you think so, considering you and stip are the same person

So lets stick with this theme about overcoming, hope, change, etc. These new movies actually expand on those themes. Everything pretty much breaks right for our heroes in RoTJ. The only film where there are costs is Empire, all of which are immediately undone (with no lasting impact) by the end of the Jabba sequence in Jedi. What happens if you hit a setback? What happens if you fail? How do you hold onto hope, redemption, becoming a better person when not only are there failures, but you are in some way instrumental in that failure in a deeply personal way.

These new films make use of our old characters by having all of them deeply complicit in a failure (the fall of Ben Solo) that is of galactic import and personally shattering. How do they respond? How are they redeemed? What makes it work is that the same people who overcame tremendous external odds also demonstrate that they can do the same internally, and they all end their story (Luke and Han) reaffirming those values and themes after a moment of desolation.

There is also the democratization of these themes. A New Hope begins with Luke as a farm boy who does great things. Even a small person can change the world and overcome great evil. By the end of Return of the Jedi this is a narrow story about a small group of people who are all related to each other, or their close personal friends. As Rian Johnson said in that piece Dime quoted a few pages back, turns out not everyone can become president. These new stories take us back to the point of a New Hope, which is that everyone can.





The point I'm making (which again, I remind you, is also the direction that basically a million fucking officially licensed star wars stories for the better part of thirty years used as a jumping off point) is not that the story HAD to continue. Just that if you chose to continue it it makes perfect sense.

You can tell a World War I movie and it ends with a cease fire and a happy ending, and that works as a stand alone story. But you can also tell a World War II story about the state of the world twenty years later as a result of the fallout of that first war and it is also a completely legitimate and honest move - and it doesn't invalidate the lessons learned from the first story. Especially because, as you mention, these stories are not about ending a war. The war is a backdrop through which personal stories are told.