Yes, Rian Johnson Is Still Working on His "Star Wars" Trilogy

piscian18 said:
Disney seems to selectively hate the expanded universe. Its not pefect but theres so much good material they threw out the window.
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It wasn't just "not perfect" but a hot mess of inconsistency. There is some great stuff there but also a lot of garbage. We also had decades of EU material which was so expansive that it was hard to keep track of. Disney being selective about what they should keep and toss out the airlock made sense to me. The problem is that Disney didn't keep enough of the good stuff and added way too much bad shit to the universe.

I enjoyed Rogue One and even Solo. There were huge problems with The Force Awakens, but you kind of had to give them the benefit of the doubt as some plot lines could have been easily been more thoroughly fleshed out or those issues could have been resolved in the sequel. Instead, TFA was made worse retroactively by a sequel that disregarded almost any potential groundwork laid down by its predecessor. That's some absolutely spectacular work and not in a good way. To make matters even worse, TLJ was an absolute dumpster fire when it came to writing. The story was bad, the legacy characters were grossly mishandled and nothing positive was done with any of the newer ones. You had writers that didn't understand the most basic physics. Even simple logic is thrown out the window as the story becomes nonsensical after awhile. Add to that, bad fight choreography and you have something that cost over 200 million dollars that just isn't worth watching.

Rian Johnson is a shitty writer and an awful director just going off of TLJ. I have zero interest in anything he's involved in going forward.
 
piscian18 said:
I consider myself a Star Wars fan apart from other fans. If you toured my house or work space youd see stars wars vehicles galor but not single reference to all the ancillary bs like jedis and sith. As an artist and an engineer Im obsessed with ralph mcquarries "lived in universe" and designs. I have a huge display at work including a "sales features" poster for the AT-AT. I also consider myself a movie buff. "Last Jedi" is, star wars aside, one of the worst fucking movies Ive ever seen. Thats including the prequels. Its literally just 2 hours of discortent nonsense and bait and switch plot lines thatt go no where. its a fucking travesty that carrie fishers last film was this wet garbage. at least anton yelkin went out on a high note with "the green room". The sad thing is "Solo" is close to great and no one will remember it a year from now. Rian did great with "brick" but man he murdered star wars.
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You sound like me! I remember seeing Star Wars, Empire, and RotJ in the theaters during their first runs. I had almost all the toys and still have them to this day. For all the criticism of the prequels (including my own), at least the core mythology was intact and The Clone Wars salvaged some of it.

TLJ was a terrible movie even disregarding the SW angle. The best part was literally the end credits.

Disney seems to selectively hate the expanded universe. Its not pefect but theres so much good material they threw out the window.
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A Thrawn movie was never going to happen as long as Lucas owned SW, but Disney is greedy so it might one day.
 
Meh, Im out.
SW is dead.. been mourning for a while I guess.
Moving on though.
Basically Disney learned nothing, and listened to no one.
The president is the same for Lucasfilm, the worse director gets 3 movies, just wow.

These movies could be made so much better for so much less money.. its depressing to think about.

We will see if " fans" really hold the line or they will do as expected and make disney billions , as always... Except solo.
It would be better if Disney's SW garbage becomes failure after failure, maybe they would pawn off the ip to some other studio then.

I am looking forward to the series they are supposedly creating for Loki though. Loki as in Thor... Done with SW and Disney, for realsies.
 
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A Little Teapot said:
Oh come ON. How many holes could Star Wars possibly have left that haven't already been fucked? Just let it die in peace.
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Remember, Star Wars spans a large galaxy with tens of thousands of inhabited planets and thousands of years of history. Any random filmmaker could make a Star Wars film set in a remote corner of the galaxy without any connection to the Skywalkers, Empire, Jedi, etc.

I wouldn't trust Rian Johnson to make a movie about the Smurfs, let alone Star Wars.
 
A challenge when you create something immensely popular is that everyone feels a sense of ownership with it. This stuff has spread across the planet for nearly 5 decades now. That's a lot of people and generations who all have their own take and perception of how it should be. I'm not thrilled with the new stuff but then again as someone who waited in line back in '77, and the next two, I remember even back then it was hit more miss with fans and critics. Critics didn't initially praise it, quite the opposite. It was the fans who made it big and only after that the mass media jumped onto the bandwagon when they could cash in on magazine, newspaper, advertising, etc., sales. When empire came out the fans split over the Vader reveal at the end. Most fans raged over Ewoks in Return. All that long before the prequels, which I recently tried to re-watch and for me I feel they have not aged well and everyone is still complaining over the re-edits Lucas did. Move onto 'Droids' and that was awful to me but some loved it. Either of the Clone wars had mixed responses(but won some awards). I had mixed feelings about Rebels but ended up loving it by the last 2 seasons. Still not into the current series though.

I read some of the books and comic books too. They were not all good either. Sure the original Zahn stuff was epic and many dreamed of those being made but there's plenty to fill landfills out there too. I don't feel that Rian ruined SW but that's because honestly this 'universe' was never that perfect to begin with. It's a myth of ancient mythological proportions. I'm done going to the theater for them but I'll still either stream or buy the disc if I like it enough. Either way the all the fans that clump together to regurgitate their angst or 'reviewers' have proved to be either clueless or brainwashed into the full history of this franchise. To each their own but it'd be nice to see the 'fans' act like individuals instead of mobs who can't see the individuality of others. SW is never going to please everyone so people should stop trying to use it as such.
 
My opinion? TFA was ok, I enjoyed it. The first half of Rogue 1 was a mess, but the last half was great. Solo had too much fanservice, but to be honest, I think I enjoyed it more than any of the others.
GoodBoy said:
Episode 9 should reveal that basically all of Episode VIII was a force dream of a possible 'fucking horrible' possible future... Then they can fix that clusterfuck of a movie and get shit back on track, pick up with Rey meeting Luke on that island, but something different happens after that.
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Burn it all down and start over? Not a bad idea.

I can appreciate the twist of killing off Snoke the way they did. Ruining Luke's character really came across as "because I'm the director and I want to leave my mark."
 
I loved TLJ.
TFA was ok.
Rogue One was fanservice but it was fun.
Solo was surprisingly good, I actually enjoyed it more than Rogue One.

Every single SW thread gets trolled. There are certain things I would have done differently if I made the movies, more backstory for the rise of the First Order and Leia's Resistance in TFA, some dialogue changes in TLJ, but I'm enjoying the new films.

Mohonri said:
I can appreciate the twist of killing off Snoke the way they did. Ruining Luke's character really came across as "because I'm the director and I want to leave my mark."
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Nah, I don't think Luke's character was ruined. This story arc is a tragedy where the Republic fails to completely take hold. Luke loses his students to evil and goes into exile in search of an ancient Unknown World, believing the Jedi merely perpetuate the conflict. I liked all the subtle connections to KOTOR.
 
A Little Teapot said:
Oh come ON. How many holes could Star Wars possibly have left that haven't already been fucked? Just let it die in peace.
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Reminds me of...

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Disney overpaid for a property that banks its success on merchandise.....and neglected to consider kids today not only don't play with toys and action figures, they arent into collecting...they're hipsters, who are poor, so they lease everything...they lease their record collections, they let someone else drive them with Uber, they don't get married and have kids cuz they can't handle the cost or responsibility.........oh sure they want to DRESS like Jedi's......<cough>, I digress....
 
To Rian Johnson's credit, Looper was a solid movie and the episodes of breaking bad he directed were awesome.

I'd like to believe that TLJ was a fluke and the idiot plot was because someone else had their hands in it (Kennedy and co...). Something like: "Hi Rian, do you want to direct Star Wars 8?"... "That's a yes? Ok then, one condition, write us a script around this bullshit plot". Moot point now I suppose, since the franchise is effectively trashed after TLJ :(
 
MaZa said:
What is with companies doubling down with their bad decisions lately? Stupid pride that they cannot let go?
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Social justice warriors supporting other social justice warriors. They don't care if the movies are crap.
 
Star Wars was pretty much dead after Lucas split from his first wife. I don't recall the whole backstory, but it usually involved Lucas being a whiny bitch and her telling him to man up when no studio wanted to produce a "space opera" while re-writing his crappy dialogues. She won an academy award for her editing work on the first Star Wars movie even. They divorced in 1983, same year that Return of the Jedi was released.

So unless those two get back together, there probably won't be any decent Star Wars movies.
 
i dont get why people say star wars new movies are lame, i dont consider myself an star wars big fan, but i've seen the last ones and they seem good and enjoyable, and the history is good. Also, afaik there are no writting novels/books of the current events of the saga so there's no way to compare it to anything and say things like "the history is bad" or "that wasn't supposed to happen"...
 
luisxd said:
i dont get why people say star wars new movies are lame, i dont consider myself an star wars big fan, but i've seen the last ones and they seem good and enjoyable, and the history is good. Also, afaik there are no writting novels/books of the current events of the saga so there's no way to compare it to anything and say things like "the history is bad" or "that wasn't supposed to happen"...
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There’s realistic and unrealistic events for even a fictional universe.

I didn’t mind TFA but TLJ was character and universe breaking. I am not hardcore by any means but I did watch all the prior movies and recognize this. TLJ... was such a turd from almost all angles.

Here’s a good youtube video on it from someone more articulate than me. I’ll watch episode IX for free when it comes out... but that franchise is pretty dead to me. My kids don’t care either.

 
Wiffle said:
Star Wars was pretty much dead after Lucas split from his first wife. I don't recall the whole backstory, but it usually involved Lucas being a whiny bitch and her telling him to man up when no studio wanted to produce a "space opera" while re-writing his crappy dialogues. She won an academy award for her editing work on the first Star Wars movie even. They divorced in 1983, same year that Return of the Jedi was released.

So unless those two get back together, there probably won't be any decent Star Wars movies.
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I know lucas handed them an outline as part of the sale and they threw it in the garbage. I'm not sure why. Katheen kennedy has a wealth of credit under her belt, I really dont know what got into her. The funny thing is they originally gave the trilogy to Michael Arndt, the guy who wrote Toy Story 3. He spent a couple years on it and Disney started getting nervous. The anniversary was rolling around and they asked him to wrap it up in 6 months. He told them they were nuts and doing a proper trilogy script and outline would take another year at least. Disney "let him go" and called in JJ Abrams to spin something up. He threw together Force Awakens in a few months right on schedule though obviously its really subpar copy pasta like literally everything he does. They paid Lawrence Kasdan to put his name on it but I'd bet anything he didnt have fuck all to do with it. Force Awakens is tired and a mess. Ive seen it maybe 1 and a half times.

Its a shame, I think with some tweaking Force Awakens could have been pretty good. Everybody in the movie is a cartoon character, even the serious villains. Its constant annoying cheeky bs.

I'm also a big Rian Johnson. Brick and Looper are some of the best films I've ever seen. I've heard crazy rumors that he did it all intentionally to ruin Star Wars and kill the franchise. Seriously you should watch "Brick" the pacing, storytelling and dialog in TLJ is completely out of character for him. I'd bet anything somebody will literally teach a "what not to do" course in film school focusing on TLJ. TLJ is a complete cinematic trainwreck.

I have zero interest in episode IX. It really doesnt have anything going for it. If they maybe threw Gareth Edwards at it or somebody like Jon Favreau. You know a journeyman. However Katheen Kennedy is supposedly mad at Edwards because he ran over budget and time on Rogue One. Jon Favreau stated hed never work on a big franchise like that again. He even wrote the "Chef" as an analog for his horrible experience with Marvel.

With JJ running the show again its going to be another yawner.
 
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Eymar said:
^ I get that Disney wants to cast a new generation of heroes since the original trilogy actors are older, but to totally turn off the fans of the original is stupid intentional or not. I mean they do realize who the parents of most of the next generation of fans are right? I enjoyed TLJ, but man did I realize I don't love Star Wars any more because the new characters are pretty bland.
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It’s probably racist and/or sexist to call the new characters anything but awesome ;)
 
I think people were too harsh on the prequals. They are still great movies even if they tend to slog about, they still feel like star wars. Episode 7 was good, but not amazing. Episode 8 i fell asleep in the theater, it was horrible. Solo and Rogue one were both good movies.
 
oROEchimaru said:
I think people were too harsh on the prequals. They are still great movies even if they tend to slog about, they still feel like star wars. Episode 7 was good, but not amazing. Episode 8 i fell asleep in the theater, it was horrible. Solo and Rogue one were both good movies.
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Nah, they were still bad. Sith is the closest one to being good, but its still a huge mess and feels like Lucas tried to cram multiple movies into one. The entire prequel trilogy is poorly paced, poorly written, poorly acted, poorly directed, etc. They fall into the same traps as almost every prequel story. Over explaining, breaking continuity, and focusing too much on trying to give an answer to every tiny detail.
 
The new Star Wars movies (all of them) are up there with the new Total Recall, Predator, Robocop, and whatnot.

SW has been dead to me for a long time. Disney was the worst match for the franchise.
 
Hakaba said:
Rogue one was the best SW movie to come out in the last 30 years, everything else was horrible.
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Agreed! Rogue One nailed it...I was happy there weren't a bunch of Jedi in it either. (Just Darth Vader at the end, yes, I know he's not a jedi...)
I'd like to see other Star Wars movies that are kind of grim. I didn't pay attention, but guessing not as many kids liked Rogue One vs the other crap.
 
Dekoth-E- and dgz last two comments are on point. I only watched the movies, some of clone wars show, and played the video games so not a die hard fan. However, Star Wars had a rich lore with just those two mediums that I really cared about the characters and overall story. After watching TLJ, what's the point? Does even the general viewing audience really care about the villains and heroes as they do with Fast and Furious movies, forget about original SW trilogy.
 
It's the same bunch of assclowns that are running Star Trek now, and also doing a fine job of killing it deader than dead Jim.
 
Derangel said:
Nah, they were still bad. Sith is the closest one to being good, but its still a huge mess and feels like Lucas tried to cram multiple movies into one. The entire prequel trilogy is poorly paced, poorly written, poorly acted, poorly directed, etc. They fall into the same traps as almost every prequel story. Over explaining, breaking continuity, and focusing too much on trying to give an answer to every tiny detail.
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The prequels did a very good job of demonstrating just how important Marcia Lucas was to the OT. It's also worth noting that the younger kids enjoyed the prequels more then the cranky older fans (such as myself), which was the point. I just wish someone competent would do a sequel to Willow!
 
Everyone has one book in them


Star War Episode 14 Jedi Luke Skywalker marries Jabba the Hut over at Pizza Hut. Hans Solos has a large stack of Solo cups he smuggled from Toby Keith they are having a party with Jabba. IG88 has issues the last droid Bounty Hunter while is the qucker picker upper.
 
Rian's one of the best directors today, with Nolan, Fincher, Cohen's. Really don't get the SW hate. Abrams brings the nostalgia and fan service and little else. And hey, he's bookending this trilogy, be happy then. You don't have to think, during 2/3rds of it.
Rian is more of a filmmaker where he actually wants to say something. And i think he did, he had commentary on heros, legends, and how rebellions start. He also weaved other things from the start to the end of the film. Also characters need to change, especially if they "exist" in the story for decades. He had balls to keep Carrie Fisher's whole performance in too. Could've very very easily gone the other way, and lost most of it, as well as a key scene with Luke. And big stuff had to change in a trilogy. The irony is that similar ish changes (not the stories themselves) but the plot changing and story progression, is not suddenly different from the old ones. Big shit happened in those too. Lot of narrow thinking on this stuff, no offense. If you think it's simply awful and there's nothing of value and a whole trilogy/long running series is ruined... you might want to elevate your thinking. Even "shit movies" aka anything The Rock is in, has some value, ie escapism.
 
maverick212 said:
Rian is more of a filmmaker where he actually wants to say something. And i think he did, he had commentary on heros, legends, and how rebellions start. He also weaved other things from the start to the end of the film. Also characters need to change, especially if they "exist" in the story for decades.
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The bolded part above is the problem. It seems like he wanted the movie to be a Rian Johnson movie, not a Star Wars movie. Fans want a Star Wars movie, and the name of the director doesn't matter as much to them.

Fans of the franchise like what Luke became in the original trilogy, and that's the character they wanted to see. The original trilogy took a whiny, naive boy and followed his Hero's Journey to the end. To instead transform Luke into a bitter old hermit who refuses to fight is to essentially undo that entire story arc. And to what end? There are a gazillion ways they could have given Luke an appropriate sendoff in TLJ, but they chose the exact opposite. For.....reasons? Mark Hammil himself expressed his discontent over the handling of Luke's character. I don't think I've seen a single justification for why it was a good choice.

Heroes are aspirational, i.e. someone we want to be like, and destroying the hero's character is not what fans want, nor does it make for a good movie.

On top of that, though, the whole movie is full of stupid writing/directing choices. Unless they can find a really clever explanation of how hyperspacing through an enemy ship to destroy it is a one-off, they can never do space combat again. The characters are there only to serve the plot, and so their decisions are non-sensical.
 
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Mohonri said:
Fans of the franchise like what Luke became in the original trilogy, and that's the character they want to see. The original trilogy took a whiny, naive boy and followed his Hero's Journey to the end. Fans wanted to see him as he appeared at the end of TLJ, but for real. To instead transform Luke into a bitter old hermit who refuses to fight is to essentially undo the entire story arc of the original trilogy. And to what end? There are a gazillion ways they could have given Luke an appropriate sendoff in TLJ, but they chose the exact opposite. For.....reasons?

Heroes are aspirational, i.e. someone we want to be like, and destroying the hero's character is not what fans want, nor does it make for a good movie.
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Luke was old because of how much time had passed since ROTJ and the age of the actor who portrats him named Mark Hamill. The timeline was already set as of Force Awakens too so there was no way you could have been satisfied.
 
polonyc2 said:
Rogue One was good but doesn't stand up as well with repeat viewings...outside of Jyn Erso we pretty much no nothing about the various main characters and most people probably can't even remember most of their names...Solo was actually better overall with some nice character development...they went a bit overboard with giving us too many Easter Eggs to things we didn't need the answers to (how did Solo get his name, his blaster weapon etc) but it still stands up better in the long run then Rogue One
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I really liked Rogue One, but found Solo to be a decent but fairly average movie. I don't know why you say it has good character development. I think it has none at all. Han starts out as a roguish good guy, in the middle of the movie he's a roguish good guy and he ends the movie being a roguish good guy. There was no arc at all.
 
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