Which Creative Decision Hurt the Star Wars Disney Sequel Trilogy the Most?

[Winter]

It's really hard to point to one singular moment in this Trilogy that could be argued hurt the series the most but for me I think comes down to 2 Creative Decision and one point of executive meddling that ultimately doomed the Trilogy to the end we got.

The first problem I see is the Decision of The Force Awakens AND The Last Jedi to rehash the overall story of A New Hope and The Empire Strikes back with a few elements of Return of the Jedi thrown in. Repeating ideas and story beats from previous entries in the series is nothing new to this series but it worked in the first two Trilogies because Lucas was attempting to draw parallels between the two Trilogies. Scenes like Anakin and Dooku's duel in Revenge of the Sith is meant to emulate the Duel between Luke and Vader at the end of Return of the Jedi with one key difference, Luke is able to resist the pull of the Dark Side while Anakin gives into his anger and kills Dooku.

By contrast scenes in the Disney Sequel Trilogy that call back to the Original Trilogy are done in almost seemingly just to have a call back. They do little to nothing new and are just the same scene just with altered dialogue.

For example, both TLJ and Empire have a scene where the hero learns the truth about their past in a scene with the film's main villain. Said villain offers them the chance to rule that galaxy and talks about how they see greatness in them and to join them in getting ride of the old regime and creating a new one only for the hero to reject this offer. They escape and rejoin their friends as they narrowly escape the evil empire.

Another scene, a Jedi Knight who is (more or less) the last Jedi goes to confront his former student who fell to the Dark Side with the two engaging in a Ligthsaber duel and in doing so the Jedi Knight gives up his life to give our heroes a chance to escape. But with the heroes is someone who will learn the ways of the Force and bring forth a new Jedi order.

And finally, Luke confronts the Darkness within himself while questioning the value of the Jedi way and chooses to embrace the true meaning of the Jedi by rejecting a Lightsaber duel.

For all the talk about this Trilogy letting the past die the films just can't seem to escape the shadow of the Original Trilogy calling back to the older films while adding little to nothing new and doing basically nothing with the original ideas is DOES bring forward. A former Storm Trooper turned Rebel Hero who may or may not be a Force User, that's a great idea and one that can make for a great protagonist... Or we could have him just relearn the same lesson twice (that of putting others before himself) and have him scream REEEEYYYY a lot.

And the reason for him being underused, Rian Johnson found Finn to be boring and couldn't figure out how to make him interesting so he just shoved him into a subplot to get him out of the plots he did care about.

Rey learning she comes from nothing and has no connection to anyone to the Original Trilogy while failing to redeem Kylo Ren and seeing Luke wasn't he person she thought he would be. Not a bad idea but one that could be interesting to explore aaaannndd we're just going to ignore that idea and just give 5 minutes of screen time and have her be all happy and smiling like nothing happened... okay?

But the other problem with this Trilogy comes from the other creative decision that pretty much doomed the third film and it's a decision I still don't understand and don't know why anyone stopped it. And that decision being, the 4th act of TLJ basically wrapping up the entire story of the Trilogy in act 2 of said Trilogy.

Honestly for all the flaws of TFA and TLJ there was still a chance to salve this Trilogy in the third film had TLJ JUST ended half an hour early. Just end it at the scene where Kylo is offering Rey to join him because that would leave fans with a LOT of questions and make them want to come back for the third and finally film. Snoke is dead, Rey may fall to the Dark Side, Finn and Rose have been captured and are about to be executed, Phasma's back and the First Order is obliterating the Resistance's fleet. The only ray of hope is that Luke MIGHT have found a reason to rejoin the fight after Yoda gave him one more lesson.

It's still flawed but there's a lot that can be done with for the writer who comes in to direct the next film... Or we could resolve all these points, have Finn kill Phasma with him and Rose escaping, save the Rebellion, Rey rejects Kylo and we just kill off Luke via Force Crank Call... Why was this allowed?

It's like Johnson was writing this film with the mindset that there were not going to be any films in the future so just decided to wrap of the story here and now when another film was ALREADY in the works and needed SOMETHING to build off of.

Now that's not to say that another film couldn't have worked because, as most of you no doubt know, there WAS film written up and planned out and ready to go but was scrapped due to a decision made, not by the people working in this film, but the higher ups. And this decision was to can this idea and make a completely new version NOT based on the script already written but to basically reuses ideas from the original plan for TLJ while building on the ideas of TLJ... somehow... in an attempt to please fans of TFA, TLJ, the Prequel Trilogy fans and the Original Trilogy fans.

This is like when you just barely manage to solve a basic math test and you're next assignment is to solve the P versus NP problem while being throw off a cliff. You might as well as start seeing if you know how to fly, you've got nothing to lose. In other words, this film needed a miracle... it did not get one.

There are so many problems with TDST but what ultimately hurt it was the series calling back to the Original Trilogy seemingly JUST to call back to said Trilogy, deciding to end said Trilogy in the second chapter and the studio scrapping the third film that was ready to go in favor of just winging it and hoping for the best.

But that's just my take on this and I'm just some weirdo who has to much time on her hands and clearly thinks about Star Wars to much.

[hammerofglass]

I'd say the biggest one is not explaining anything in the movies themselves. Oh you want to know who these people are and what they're fighting over? Check the art book, sold separately.

It's not like the OT where you don't need background to understand it. Empire and people rebelling against it, all you need to know. They decided to come up with a complicated scenario and then refused to tell us what it is.

[Nobody700]

I could go into a huge thing of how to fix the sequels, 4x longer than what Winter posted... so instead I'll leave this here.

Make Finn and Poe gay and they fall for each other.

I have decreed it.

[CharlesPhipps]

Clearly having no plan whatsoever.

[hammerofglass]

I could go into a huge thing of how to fix the sequels, 4x longer than what Winter posted... so instead I'll leave this here.

Make Finn and Poe gay and they fall for each other.

I have decreed it.

I'm still half-convinced that was planned and Disney chickened out. Poe suddenly coming down with the not-gays in the third one was pretty suspicious.

[Nobody700]

ACTUALLY SKY TRASH, I WAS YOUR LOVE INTEREST ALL ALONG, SKY TRASH! ME, PILOT LADY, SKY TRASH!

Jeez you can see Poe picks em well. Oh, I'm sorry... sky trash. Ya know, what Poe was thanks to Last Jedi.

[Winter]

Clearly having no plan whatsoever.

That's not so much a creative decision as it is a creative oversight and I still hold that's not the real issue because the Original Trilogy wasn't really planned out. Lucas was making everything up as he went throughout both Trilogies and still managed to make it work.

The problem here is that there was no single vision behind this Trilogy. Abrams had his idea of how the Trilogy should go, Johnson had his idea and the two clearly did not have the same vision. This is perhaps best shown with Kylo Ren's mask, Abrams had it be a big part of his character in the first film then Johnson destroyed it in a moment that is clearly intended to be a major scene for the character only for Abrams to restore it in the film right after it suggesting that he should never have lost it.

It's also clear that they saw the characters in very different lights. Abrams wanted Kylo to be more intimidating in follow-up films while Johnson leaned into the idea of him being a loser. Finn was meant to play a bigger role in the next two films, Johnson tossed him aside. Abrams liked Poe and kept him alive, Johnson disliked and wanted everyone to know that and made it where Leia and a new character were there just to demean him.

Abrams wanted Rey to go through a journey and Johnson cared so little about her that he cut out one of her most important scenes in his own film because he felt it was wasting time while keeping in several scenes of meaningless comedy that added nothing to the plot.

The only thing the two seemed to agree on was just retreading old ideas while adding little to nothing new and tossing aside plot points from past films for the sake of that repetition.

I can't help but be reminded of the Norse God of War Saga where Eric Williams,Matt Sophos Richard and Zangrande Gaubert took over the direction of the game and wanted to change ideas and story beats that Cory Barlog, the lead developer, director and writer of the last game, had which he gave them the green light for BUT told them not to change 3 key story points, Atreus had to leave, Brokk had to die and Ragnarök had to happen.

There was no such rules for Johnson when he took over so when Rise came around and Abrams was put back in charge he had to rework the story to get it back to what he intended.

So, really, it's not that there was no plan it's that there was no cooperation between the two people who were directing this series.

[Fuzzy Necromancer]

"Somehow, Palpatine has returned"

[hammerofglass]

Putting Palpatine's return speech that the third movie revolves around in freaking Fortnite.

[CharlesPhipps]

"Somehow, Palpatine has returned"

I put this alongside removing the Mon Mothma scenes from Revenge of the Sith.

"Who would want to see the formation of the Rebel Alliance" is like, "Who would be interested in the resurrection of the Dark Lord?"