LogFAQs > #924745921

Mead posted...

8 had a lot of issues but to act like its worse than any of the prequels is just bananas

Taken as a whole, it probably was.

The Luke/Rey/Kylo parts were actually pretty good, people who were annoyed about Luke not getting a happy ending (or the people who were just pissed that he didn't found a New Jedi Order and marry Mara Jade like he did in the EU) notwithstanding. But even those parts had flaws.

And almost everything else in the movie is absolutely terrible, and made worse by being mostly pointless or constantly falling into the category of "every single person in this scene is an idiot". It doesn't help that Rian Johnson's sole goal for the film seems to have been to take every single dangling plot hook he'd been handed, and deliberately and dismissively ruin every single one of them before passing the whole mess off to someone else to fix. Which may be the real sin of the movie - and one the prequels never really committed - namely, sabotaging future films in the franchise.

In terms of pure film-making and plotting, I'd argue it's easily worse than any of the prequels. It's only real saving grace over the prequels is that the actors aren't quite as wooden and the visuals are somewhat more dynamic, but even that's devalued by the fact that those positives are in service to nothing.

If you cut out everything in the film that doesn't involve Rey, Kylo, and Luke, and then you expand on their scenes to actually solve their inherent problems, and then you come up with minor things for Finn and Poe to do that directly relate to the core of the movie (ie, Rey and Kylo), you could probably salvage a worthwhile film out of it. But as is, the terrible parts completely unbalance anything worthwhile, until the overall experience manages to irritate and annoy far more than Jar-Jar or Anakin ever did.

Say what you want about Lucas, or the prequels (and make no mistake, they ARE bad), but at least he had an overarching vision for the narrative (even if it was a bad one). The sequels go too far in the opposite direction, and come across like disjointed messes with no purpose or goal because there's no singular vision helming the ship.

The MCU works well because above all of the separate filmmakers and screenwriters, there is ONE man who is dictating how the movies need to intermesh and the ultimate ending they were working towards. The sequels lack that completely, because "the guy from Lost", a transgressive filmmaker, and "the guy who did Jurassic World" were basically given carte blanche to do whatever they wanted with no overarching plot or end goal, and no real restrictions or guidance.


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