In the defence of the New Trilogy

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I know this is going to rile up some people, but simply the last trilogy, finishing the Skywalker saga is most difficult one to comprehend. At least for the larger audience, but in you have vested time and effort to understand the Force related things in canon material, then the trilogy is easier to understand because it's almost all about the Force.

Thing is, while George Lucas was still in charge, he started to dabble with the big things of how magnificent or how awesome the Force can ultimately be and for those you get Yoda vs Doku match in the first trilogy. Not the original because all things Force related are pretty dulled down and that is what the large audience has experienced. That the Force is somewhat limited in the SW realm, when it's not. Not to its masters.

Force sensitive creatures might be limited and a mindset can limit a Force user, but if you fully open up to it you'll start to approach what we'd call as a weird territory. A place where the Force is free and unregulated, like you see in the few Clone Wars and Rebels episodes, where the main character gets to meet to the real Force creatures. They are ultimately expressed with a black and a white characters, like Ben and Rey, as you see in the last trilogy...

Luke and Leia are old school Force users, where latter never really trained herself, even though in the original Luke expresses that wish. In Leia's case, she uses Force to escape the vacuum of space in order to save the rebellion and "light the spark." In Luke's case, the ultimate power that he shows is the Force Projection and then Ascension to a Force being.

The animated series Rebels showed a Force being in the Chopper planet, and it too was able to show true expressions of Force and do things things that seems beyond the capabilities of ordinary Force user, being it one from either side, or standing in the middle as a Grey.

In the last trilogy, they chose the main PoV to be Rey, but they failed in the narrative to express to the larger audience that because of everything that happened in the saga, with Jedi's and Sith's being wiped out, the evolution happened. As they keep repeating the saying "Force is everywhere, on every living thing..." and it's ultimate users had been wiped out, all that the mystical Force did was to make its ultimate expressions as a black and a white, a man and a female, real in Ben and Rey.

In the last trilogy this union, where they fight and love each other is expressed through the mysterious connection between the two. It is freaking hard to get if you haven't seen those episodes, where Filoni and Lucas go that wild place. It is not clarified in any way, but it is a conclusion that you can get, if you have watched the whole canon material.

So it leaves us in a place, where the last trilogy is harder to get than any of the previous material, animated or live-action. The films are kind of artistic and in true Disney fashion they are ultimate expression of what Lucas wished to show about the Force and its users. They are not bad in any way, just harder to get. And because of that fact, some claimed that they cocked up things.

They are just opinions, just like this one.

 

[Mon0Zer0]

Ultimately, the big trouble with the New Trilogy is that they winged it. They handed the reigns over to three film makers who wrote independently and there was no overarching vision. Everything set up in TFA was subverted or ignored in TLJ. Everything in TLJ ignored in TRS. It wasn't a long film made by committee, but three different films by three different committees, each with their own ideas of what the star wars universe should be or what the themes of the trilogy are.

The problems of the films weren't really down to the individual themes, but the lack of planning, unity and the tension between one film maker who wanted to make a film about reckoning with the past; another who couldn't decide if he wanted to make an anti-war film about the role of finance capital in conflict or an anti-individualist movie about power to the people; and an unwilling film maker who was left with the narrative mess of TLJ*, and the fan backlash and thought, "Screw it. You want a villain? POW! Here's the emperor! You want X-wings? POW! How d'ya like them X-wings! Eat the X-Wings! EAT THEM!"

They should really have taken GL's treatment for the sequel trilogy and used that as a skeleton.

* At the end of TLJ the direction was so open ended, and all the previous elements set up in TFA had been closed or subverted, so that everything was right back to square one, bar Rey who had no character development since TFA. Kylo was no longer a scary villain having been upstaged by Luke. Snoke was dead. TRS had to set something up to rival the threat of Snoke and defeat it all within the arc of a single movie.

 

[Rodders]

I have to agree with Mon0Zer0. The sequel trilogy had no plan and no idea where it was going. I also think that they (Disney and Lucasfilm) were extraordinarily lazy and didn't have a care what film they made as they thought that we would go and see it anyway and just lap it up. I'm quite glad that we disappointed them.

Strange to extend the whole Skywalker story that had finished quite nicely with RoTJ. It's a big universe and I'm pleased to see Disney start to move away from the Skywalkers and the Solos.

I'm not a fan of the sequels, but I've enjoyed The Mandalorian and i am looking forward to the new films.

 

[Margaret Note Spelling]

Not too long ago I went and tried to explore a lot the surrounding explanations, backstory, peripheral material that we'd been given for those three movies, in an attempt to simply get to the real underlying story behind the trilogy, and try to judge that without the messiness of its execution. In the process, I found something out: there was no underlying story to find. There were a lot of fan theories, any of which could be true based on the data we're given, but trying to make sense of even five things that happened together is going to leave you going in circles. And I'm not even just talking about between movies; this applies to within the movies' individual plots themselves. It's like trying to untangle a ball of string with a hundred ends, none of which lead to each other. Or no ends at all. It's logically inconsistent, or at least incoherent.

Which, in fiction, isn't a deadly problem. You can make almost anything logically consistent in a fictional universe, if you try. The point is that no one with any authority has done it for us yet, and all the fans have been having to do it themselves--hence all the varying interpretations of it. Five different people with a functional grasp of storytelling could tell five different stories of galactic events based on the actual facts that we're given in those three movies. Fundamental questions behind how and why a particular thing in the story happened, trying to make it mesh with everything else that also happened in a way that's true to the writers' visions--is impossible. Nobody figured anything out to start with. It's not a needle in a haystack. Nobody put a needle in there in the first place. Most writers start with an idea of a progression of events and then throw in the details, but it's as if the writers of the new trilogy threw in details and plot events and forgot to think of a story to go with them.

Which isn't to say it's impossible for further writers to eventually tease a story out of it all someday, what with all the tie-in novels and perhaps even the TV shows. But for now, it's not there. I simply cannot judge whether I like the Sequel Trilogy or not, because it's not a story yet. It hasn't been resolved into any single canon progression of events. When it has, then I'll decide if I like the story.

In a way, it's like actual history. Some sources, some facts, and a lot of unknowns. Much of the time we have no idea what we're even looking at, or what context to place it in. Is it Egyptian? Is it older? Who killed the king, anyway? Although, at least in real life, we have the comfort of knowing there are genuine true answers to things, even if we don't know them. In fiction...is there an actual reason this precious Egyptian artifact caused the Plague and the Great Fire of London, or did no one actually think before just having it happen in the story? (Apologies if that's an actual plot point anywhere. I made it up just now. )

Summing up: I'm going to reserve full judgement until someone in charge of the story actually comes up with a story vision that interprets even much of what happened in them. Until then, your guess is literally as good as mine, and so is everyone else's. There's no truth to find in the new trilogy.

 

[ctg]

This sort of anecdote only underscores the overwhelming opinions of fans when it comes to the Sequel Trilogy: there was no clear plan. The more we learn, the more it seems clear that Lucasfilm and Disney could never settle confidently into one sort of vision or another – nor could the studio fully support the directors (J.J. Abrams and Rian Johnson) that it put in place primarily for their unique directorial visions. The fallout has been even more disconcerting, as Lucasfilm has had to tap all of its other media platforms (novels, comic books, animation, live-action TV) in order to patch up the many storytelling holes that the Sequel Trilogy left open.

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I was wrong. Dave Filoni had nothing to do with the trilogy. I would have assumed that Bad Robot would have at least consulted him, but no. So, the easiest way for the Disney would be to call last trilogy as canon, and put it in alternative universe, with the other Expanded Universe stuff and let the live-action series to fill in the canon material.

Emperor should stay dead and not become an uber god, which doesn't even make sense in the lore. But in order to compromise I would keep first two movies and completely dismiss the last one, or then put all of them in the EU for artistic vision.