Star Wars - How To Kill A Franchise

nobody's happy about how the star wars sequels turned out uh sure there are some people out there who did enjoy the trilogy and fair enough what makes for a good story is subjective but two things that i think we can all agree on are this overall interest in the star wars franchise is at an all-time low and the recent star wars trilogy even if there were moments of merit was woefully worse than it could have been and when i think about the staggering wasted potential of these past star wars films how they could have been so much more than they were i'm not angry or even frustrated more than anything else i'm just disappointed and i'd hazard a guess that most of you feel the same way but what's the answer to the title how do you kill a franchise well i may have gone a bit crazy today because this is the longest video essay that i've ever made in my usual videos i'll usually identify one reason why a thing's great or terrible but i don't think that's possible today too many mistakes were made and there is no one reason why star wars is now effectively a dead brand so instead of making one video say i've essentially made three each on the three biggest reasons why star wars is now in the state it is now and how quite bizarrely it seems like the star wars fans themselves are the ones that hate this recent trilogy the most and at the end of it all will be part four in part four i'll be giving my pitch for a complete rewrite of how this sequel trilogy should have been carried out so do stick around for that so how did star wars go from something that captivated generations of people to being one that's resulted in shells full of unsold toys and having an audience that seems to hate it more than it enjoys it if i had to pin down why the fanbase feels so betrayed in just one sentence it would probably be because the sequel trilogy is a trilogy made only for the average goer and is explicitly not made for pre-existing star wars fans and i know that makes no sense right because we have so many nostalgia cash ins and what are those if not fan service therefore it's made for the fans but it's not and bear with me here out of the three films by far the one that most falls into being explicitly made not for the fans is the last jedi one of the really interesting trends i've seen with not just every sequel film but especially the last jedi is that the people who don't care about star wars and just watch the films because there's nothing else on the cinema or it's free on netflix might as well see what all the star wars fuss is about are the very people who've enjoyed the sequel trilogy more than the core fanbase has if you're an average viewer who just wants a vaguely entertaining film when johnson introduced starship ramming into the world you probably thought it was fun but you're not invested in the franchise as much as the fans so you either wouldn't realize or you just wouldn't care when you realize the terrible inconsistencies this creates in the world for example if starship ramming creates this much damage why did the empire bother to sink ridiculous amounts of time and resources into building two death stars when they could have just crashed a few starships into any planets they wanted destroyed uh it would have been a lot cheaper so why didn't they do it and also why haven't we seen this tactic of starship ramming done in other star wars space battles as of yet there are no good answers to those questions and now we're leading up to part one because there's one aspect about the last jedi that that i think is completely indefensible if you want to say that the starship ramming was a great moment because it looked visually stunning i can understand where you're coming from because it does look pretty badass like when snoke is suddenly killed you might have really enjoyed that twist because it was so unexpected even though it forced abrams to resurrect palpatine in the next film with no foreshadowing and completely screwed up the whole narrative direction of the trilogy you may have loved the twist in itself and from a certain perspective there is a really good argument for why snoke's sudden death was a good moment but what is i really don't like using this word in opinion peace video essays i really don't but i think this time it's warranted what i think is an objectively bad call from ryan johnson was how he handled luke can i just say though a lot of times i would say to ryan we got to think about the bands and we said no we've got to think about the story and we've got to think about our movie which i you know just look at the pain on that poor man's face and this leads us to part one the first reason why the sequel trilogy was a disappointment to so many people the whole trilogy is a bad sequel in that clip you just saw mark campbell was making a really good point and even though he danced around the issue it's by far one of the sequel trilogy's biggest failings because like mark said it is about the fans but it's not just about the fans it's also about the matter of simply making a good sequel how abrams and johnson failed at this i'll be breaking down throughout part one but to boil it down they had two separate philosophies both of which floored abram's strategy wasn't about continuing the story it was about copying the story that had come before about taking what we were already given changing almost nothing about it then essentially giving us the same thing twice but at least abram's philosophy was better than johnson's because at the very least abrams respected the star wars legacy even if he did a terrible job at expanding upon it for example throughout the whole time han solo was in the force awakens abrams respected his character completely in my opinion i think that han solo's character was one of the best highlights of the force awakens like seeing han decades later still making bad deals with criminals and getting into all kinds of trouble he's exactly how we remember him and it's good fun seeing him back in action but when it comes to respecting the legacy while abrams gave a good college try johnson didn't even try in fact he actively disrespected it he believed that the best way to tell these sequel stories was to burn everything down forget everything that came before and start from scratch and when it comes to purely making a good film johnson's approach is genuinely viable but when it comes to making a good sequel without a shadow of a doubt it's a terrible philosophy like quite possibly the single worst philosophy it is possible to have and before we break it down further i know that most of you watching just like me are writers yourselves and you follow my channel not just because you like hearing the ramblings of cynical englishmen but also because you're interested in improving your writing craft well i'd like to quickly mention that a while back i created a class on skillshare all about how to make a great character it's just over 40 minutes long and i packed it full of advice on how to go about creating interesting characters and if you're a writer i think you'll find a lot of what i say they're really quite useful and i can of course say without a hint of personal bias that it's the single best skillshare class ever created and if you haven't seen it yet well today's your lucky day because skillshare has very kindly sponsored today's video and the first 1000 people who click my link in the description will get two months of skillshare premium totally for free which means in those two months you can watch not just my class but any of the thousands of other skillshare classes on creative writing for no cost whatsoever and once those two months are up it's less than ten dollars a month for a premium membership once you've finished my class i'd recommend the next one you check out is creative writing essentials by daniel jose older in this older breaks down story structure specifically how to structure individual scenes and it's a class i've learned to turn from so if being a better writer is something you're interested in please do click my link in the description and start your free trial on skillshare today once i've released this video there's only a thousand spaces left so sign up now while you still can but anyway back to the video the general opinion on the force awakens is that it's perfectly entertaining with some nice acting good humor and overall it's quite serviceable i'm sure you remember that when the film came out the response was pretty positive like like come on even i hate everything said he liked it which in hindsight doesn't seem possible i'm fairly sure it's illegal for him to like things but it's a good movie it just so happens to be a terrible sequel and before we ask why it's a bad sequel we need to first find an example of a good sequel and to answer that let's look at what is probably the most beloved sequel of all time terminator 2. now by itself terminator 2 is an entertaining movie but when it comes to being a good sequel it's the gold standard like what i'd argue is the main reason why is it takes what people loved about the original but it doesn't just carry those things over it expands upon them the terminator is a perfect example in the first film we see him be nothing more than a ruthless monster but now in the second movie we get a close look at how a terminator thinks and feels and learns as we explore him in new ways the same for sarah connor in the first film she was a naive waitress but now she acts like a soldier with a ruthless determination and she is definitely more than just some sidekick as she has her own agency like when she goes after dyson the founder of skynet and while terminator 2 does this wila expands upon the elements of the original it also introduces holy new elements like we have a new protagonist john connor we have a new villain with creative and terrifying powers and this is really important instead of just repeating the old plot of surviving the terminator as it hunts them down we have a wholly new plot in t2 where they scheme to take down skynet before it can be created and i'd say that this right here is why so many of the terminator sequels fail at being good sequels because basically every terminator movie except for salvation all at their core have an identical plot a terminator comes back in time hunts the protagonist down and the protagonist tries to survive throughout the length of the movie until they killed the terminator in the final act if you ask me terminator 2 is the closest thing to a perfect sequel that exists and this is why the force awakens is a terrible sequel even if it does a good job at being entertaining because the force awakens copies over those original elements but it makes the terrible mistake of not exploring them in new ways like han solo was a great example yes it was great to see him back in action but he's identical to how he used to be it's been what 20 years like wouldn't it be so much more interesting to see how han's changed and developed over this time you know instead of him being the exact same except with just added wrinkles and i'm not saying that abram should have pulled a johnson and warped him so completely he wasn't even remotely the same character like he did with luke but i am saying that he should have pulled the james cameron and taken han in a different yet also a totally natural direction that's in line with his character like we can still have hand be the snarky witty gunslinger he always was but maybe now he's getting old when they're at mazes cantina he starts limping and tells everyone to go ahead without him because his back hurts or he's trying to hide how he's out of breath because he's just not as fit as he used to be and this can really tug on people's heartstrings because we see his age is catching up with him like and a hand's beginning to think that maybe a life on the road isn't viable for him anymore he's still the exact same person he was but he's beginning to think that maybe just maybe he should give the falcon to chewbacca and rey finally settle his debts and retire once and for all like that would have been a really natural direction to take han's character in a sequel movie and the exact same applies to leia and chewbacca and c-3po and so many other characters and elements all of these aspects were copy pasted from the originals with zero effort made to explore them in interesting ways and okay right imagine exploring the elements from an original story in the sequel like a gradient on the left you've got not enough change in the middle you've got that sweet spot where they're different but it feels like a natural development in their character the terminator and sarah connor from t2 hit this mark really quite well and on the right end we have too much change and to sort of visualize my point if we had to plot all the elements carried over from the original trilogy into the sequel trilogy we'd have han leia the entire plot of a new hope c3po r2d2 admiral akbar the millennium falcon lando the resistance the first order which is basically the empire with a new coat of pain and chewbacca and all of them are at the extreme left end of not enough change because everything i just listed with the exception of a few nuances here and there are basically identical to how they were in the originals and you see that point on the right where it says too much change well if you look past that like way way past that there's a point saying please for the love of god stop you're ruining it you're ruining it you've warped this thing so completely it isn't even remotely close to what it used to be is luke and all jokes aside this is a massive issue for the sequel trilogy because in a perfect sequel everything carried over from the original story should be in that goldilocks zone where they're still the same characters and factions but they've been developed in natural interesting ways that allows for entertaining new directions in the follow-up story and the sad truth is i can't think of one aspect in the original trilogy that lands in this ideal zone in the sequel trilogy because it's all either an exact copy of what it was before or it's luke and he's changed so much that he isn't even remotely the same character and this is the problem with ryan johnson's whole approach to making a sequel because to expand on what he said earlier what johnson did to luke was objectively bad in terms of making a good sequel because he so completely missed the mark of being that perfect balance between being the same yet also having something a little different about them and you want to know the worst part johnson bastardized luke's character when he didn't need to and why didn't johnson need to corrupt luke's personality because johnson could have had luke phil the exact same role of being a hermit with a cynical attitude and being that reluctant mentor while also maybe not landing in that sweet spot but at the very least dragging him way further back along the gradient and making him much more like the luke we knew and how could johnson have done this well one of the worst offenses that pissed off so many fans was how luke said he considered murdering kylo in cold blood in his sleep it's so completely out of line with the optimistic look we knew in the originals who always chose to see the good in people not the bad fixing this issue is actually really quite easy because all we have to do is turn this on its head an example of what johnson could have done when luke had kylo as a student kyla would lash out he was quick to anger and violence and there were obvious signs that kylo might fall to the dark side but luke had faith in him like this is the luke skywalker from the originals he's an optimist who always sees the best in people and when kylo shows signs that he's falling to the dark luke chooses to have faith he chooses to believe in kylo to show unconditional support but then after luke makes himself totally vulnerable to kylo in trusting him completely luke goes out on some adventure and kylo snaps he converts the few students he could to the dark side and murders the rest and luke comes back to find his temple on fire and all of his students either missing or dead like that's why he is so cynical that's why he's a hermit because he was a man of pure optimism and he was so focused in seeing the good in people that he became blind to the bad in them and luke is crippled by guilt because he knows that his mistake cost the lives of dozens of his students and also on top of that kylo betrayed him in the most painful wounding way possible and now luke chooses to be a hermit because luke doesn't trust himself enough to be in the world and not make it worse because he's in it and when rey starts getting tempted by the dark side and luke says to her i've seen this raw strength only once before it didn't scare me enough then it does now it would have landed with so much more of an emotional gut punch like god this change would have been objectively better that's right i said it dislike the video i don't care not subjectively better but objectively better because we still have luke perform the exact same role in the movie of being that reluctant mentor but also it would have made luke come far closer to that goldilocks zone that we just talked about ryan johnson has said many times in many interviews that he's a big fan of star wars but i call [ __ ] ryan johnson is a talented director like there's no doubt about it but if he actually were a real fan of star wars he would have understood luke's character better than he did and now we're moving on to what i think's the core problem as to why all three films as a collective are bad sequels because the heart of this trilogy is a clone of the old the original trilogy at its foundation is about a small group of good guy rebels fighting against a far larger evil empire that was the story and it worked quite well like say what you want about the prequels but one area where lucas just hit the nail perfectly on the head was how he didn't fall for the mistake of doing the same thing twice because as ron swanson once said it's always worse the second time around lucas realized that we don't want to see another saga about insurgents fighting an empire because we've already seen that story in the star wars canon like if we wanted to see that story again we just re-watched the originals lucas knew that so he shifted the dynamic now it's the good guys who are the ones in power and it's the bad guys that are the weaker faction as they scheme and manipulate behind the scenes to take the good guys down because lucas took the heart of the star wars formula and twisted it he didn't copy it like abrams he didn't bastardize it like johnson he just twisted it and gave us a follow-up to the originals as it tells a new story with a new plot in a new setting while still being definitively star wars that was in my opinion a brilliant call by lucas in the prequels even if some elements of those films could have been done better like i think by far the best call lucas made here was having obi-wan be one of the main characters because it feels like a natural path to take when making a prequel a lot of people disagree about whether the prequels were good or bad one of the main things that basically everyone agrees on is that obi-wan was consistently great like with obi-wan lucas did the same thing james cameron did with terminator 2. he took a character from the original story carried them over and explored them in new interesting ways when disney sat down to iron this trilogy out they made the horrific mistake of doing the exact opposite of what lucas did for the prequels because disney played it safe in the areas where they should have taken risks and they took risks in the areas where they should have played it safe for one luke simply should have been a main character in the sequels it's a no-brainer forget him being a mentor in like one of the three movies he should have had the obi-wan treatment of being one of the main characters throughout all three films yes when you're making a sequel you want to add new characters in and follow their journey of course you do but if we instead had one plotline throughout all three films as we follow finn for example as he defects from the first order then meets up with han solo and goes on his adventure and then we have an equally important other plot following luke as we continue his journey from the original films as both finn and luke are now our two protagonists it would have been a really safe choice to make yet also a really good one to make like sure this would have pleased the fans but far more importantly it would have made the films better in terms of being good sequels because they're continuing on the story but instead of making that easy safe sensible choice disney took a completely unnecessary risk by sidelining every single original character to being nothing more than a supporting character and they replaced the main cast with entirely new faces this was a pointless risk because such a good choice was staring them right in the face in the form of continuing luke's journey and even worse it was a risk that didn't pan out because these new characters are nowhere near as beloved as the original ones are and on the other hand disney played it safe in the areas where they needed to take the risks by far the worst example of this is the main dynamic of the story that we just talked about lucas already knew we'd seen the original story so he took the prequels in a fresh direction disney needed to do that like my god they needed to do that like i cannot stress enough how catastrophic disney's decision was to not twist up the star wars formula so we had a story that oozed star wars you know with the lightsabers and exploring the same cast of characters whilst also giving it a completely new plot and a fresh setting and i would say what i think is a really good idea of how they should have done that but i'm saving that until part four of this video where i'm going to do that full rewrite for this whole sequel trilogy so do stick around for that but the world of the sequels is literally just a rehash of the originals what star wars was previously known for interesting world building that captured people's imaginations all of that's now gone and that leads us to part two a boring world well surely you think the sequel's world building is exciting exciting no it's not it's dark dull oh my god it's dull it's so desperately dull and tedious and stuffy and boring and desperately fear of risk is the death of imagination all too often when a world comes along whether it be in a film or a game or a book and it blows people away it happened because the creators took a creative risk you can't create a fascinating world by using nothing but a formula by purely redoing what's been done before out of the many thousands of examples out there a good one is mass effect it's a space opera game set in a world with a ton of new ideas and creative risks and those risks paid off wonderfully because it's a world that captured the imaginations of its player base and on the other side whenever a world comes along that fails to engage people it's usually because the people who made it were too afraid to take risks and it's impossible to be creative without taking risks and it just so happens that no storytellers out there fear risk more than disney so i said in part one that the mouse made a catastrophic mistake when they didn't change up the core of star wars in this new trilogy and sure that resulted in a repetitive plot but it was a death blow in terms of the world building the reason why is in the original films with the empire and the rebels lucas explored that world in incredible depth and because in the sequel trilogy we're back to essentially the same story the world has nowhere new to go and when we see that the rebels have a secret base on that salt plain it's not even remotely interesting because we've already seen hoth and hof by the way is a far more interesting place than wherever it is that soul planet was when we see that rey lives on a desert planet called jakku it's not even remotely interesting because we've already seen tatooine and tatooine by the way is a place explored in far more depth than jakku is between the native sand people and the hive of scum and villainy of mos eisley because disney decided to play as safe as possible with their sequels they ended up accidentally tying their own hands behind their back from a world building perspective because nearly everything that appears on screen we've already seen before and even worse the originals did it better imagine if you go to a restaurant and you get a beautiful like just a masterfully crafted sundae with fresh clotted cream ice cream and it's just divine it's the best dessert you've ever had you loved it and then you go away and come back to the restaurant a week later full of high expectations and they give you a sad cheap singular scoop of vanilla ice cream that has no taste and it's called a sundae it's like the one you had before it's just a far worse version of it it would have been better if they tried to spice it up with some fresh hot brownies instead even if those brownies weren't too well made having that would have at least been better than having something that's basically the exact same only worse that's what the world building between lucas's films and the disney films feels like as for how the world building was executed i've seen a lot of arguments on reddit about how realistic the sequels world building is the most common argument i've seen people make is about whether the first order rising to power under the republic's nose made any sense and there are counter arguments to that but i don't want to talk about how realistic the world is right now because the people that are doing that i feel are distracting from the main issue because the biggest problem with the world building in the sequels is it's [ __ ] boring and a great proof of how boring this world is is because there's a pervasive sense that nothing is going on off camera it's the kind of litmus test i have where i'll know if a world has been constructed well when even though i'm not seeing it i have a strong sense that things are going on in other places like a great test of whether or not a world is well built is when the setting of the story expands to be more than just what we see on screen or on the page on this one of the most popular world building comparisons is with an iceberg when you're creating a world the perfect execution is when you construct this visible portion of world building above the waterline and it's really interesting and well crafted but you also convince the audience that below the water line out of sight is a way way larger chunk of ice that's equally as interesting and you convince the audience that there is far more to the world than just what we see george lucas was a genius when it came to achieving this and the star wars sequels failed to do this spectacularly and just like most movies we could never be too sure who made the creative choices so when i say the director's names know that i'm saying them assuming that they made every creative choice but when it comes to how abrams and johnson handled the sequel films they both clearly believe that when telling a science fiction fantasy story world building is optional but here's the problem with that philosophy it is optional in the same way that having sauce to go with pasta is optional i know i'm doing a ton of food metaphors right now i've no idea why but when you eat just spaghetti on its own you won't die if you do it and it can technically be called food but it will taste bland as hell and it will be a thoroughly forgettable meal but a great chef will make a nice sauce to go with it so the sauce complements the pasta and the pasta complements the sauce and you end up with a meal that's far more enjoyable than the sum of its parts crafting a story in a secondary world is exactly like that a secondary world meaning one that's not connected to our world yes the characters and the plot are always the heart of the story regardless of the genre but when you're writing in a secondary world you have room to do what most other stories can never do and place your plot and characters in a fascinating new setting where the world is made more interesting by the story and the story is made more interesting by the world and the story becomes more entertaining than the sum of its parts even if your plot is pretty generic if it takes place in a captivating world it takes what would have been a mediocre story and it transcends it to a whole other level of entertainment value for example let's look at a new hope what is the plot of a new hope well it's your standard hero's journey there's a big bad guy there's a boy farmer who wants to go out and explore the galaxy and if you've never seen a new hope before just from me saying those two things you can guess pretty accurately what the film's plot is going to look like nothing about a new hope's plot was all that fresh at the time but what you've got to remember is that the film was released in 1977 that was decades before the age of cgi like the audience seeing in the cinemas watched almost exclusively contemporary movies where every scene was filmed in the streets of a city or a bedroom or an office the only other movie on the same level as star wars at the time was 2001 a space odyssey most people in the audience went from rocky being the most out of this world film that they'd ever seen and then they saw star wars and when you know the context what movies were like before 1977 when you see the epic music swell as spaceships fly overhead with this grand view of a planet below like it is no wonder that back in the 70s this film ensnared the imaginations of whole generations even though the plot is your bog standard heroes journey the setting was so groundbreaking at the time that it made people care about the story way more than they would have otherwise if the setting were in a more down-to-earth kind of place like a pirate ship for example say what you want about the prequels but all three films had some really good world building we saw so many aspects of the star wars galaxy like cloning and the whole culture of the jedi order and the prequels is the first time we see grand open warfare between two proper armies in the star wars galaxy the world of the prequels was fresh creative and as a result it captured people's imaginations all over again if you ask me if we're talking about nothing more than just the world building i'd say that the prequels were better than the original films because the settings and the cultures we see are explored in far more detail but obviously that's just my opinion but as a symptom of this like i know i'm not the only one about two years ago did you get a ton of videos giving what if scenarios of the prequels spammed in your recommended section like i know i did like a few years ago channels like star wars theory and eckhart's ladder made a slew of videos that just took off and got millions of views each such as what if macewan do for anakin skywalker what if obi-wan brought anakin back to the light what if mace windu trained anakin and i could go on for ages because there are hundreds of these videos that break down the law of the prequels and use it to explore these alternate scenarios and how it would have altered the story but these videos got a ridiculous amount of views like the sheer popularity of these videos shows that there was something about the world of the prequels that just grabbed people and still grabs people so much so that millions of people are binge watching videos about revenge of the sith over 12 years after the film came out i can't think of not just any other movie but any other property that's achieved anything remotely similar to that you can say that george lucas writes terrible dialogue i'm haunted by the kiss that you should never have given me you can say that lucas may have gone too far in a few places [Music] i may have gone too far in a few places but one thing that i hope we can all agree on is that george lucas is a genius when it comes to crafting a fictional world but hold on a second all of these what-if videos were big hits let's touch the force awakens what if so what comes up then um okay first result what if the force awakens was better okay okay second result the force awakens what if it's bad um oh okay a third what if episode seven were good fourth result what if rey joined kylo ren oh okay fair enough there's here's a proper what if video but it's only got 52 000 views and it's the fourth result when you search what ifs like it's not really it doesn't really compare too well with the millions upon millions the prequel videos we're getting but if you're trying to find proof that the world building in the prequels ground people's imaginations better than the sequels this right here is probably the best proof that you're gonna get but what are some tangible examples of good world building okay so when i first saw attack of the clones there was a detail that i just loved like when obi-wan arrives at kamino we see that his fighter can't achieve ftl speed on its own and it needs an external attachment ring in order to pass the speed of light and this is such a small detail lucas could have so easily not put in but i think it's brilliant because it shows the advancement of technology in the original trilogy the fighters the rebels use all have internal ftl drives that they use to jump from place to place but in the prequels that level of compact ftl hasn't been achieved yet and a small fighter craft need this external hardware in order to pass the speed of light like this is great world building it does such a good job at showing how technology has advanced over the years and this is far from the only detail showing the advancement of technology another good example is when luke loses his hand in empire strikes back and he gets a replacement that is perfectly lifelike but in the prequels when anakin loses his hand like he gets this metallic ugly one that doesn't look anywhere near as good again this shows how prosthetic technology has advanced over the years in the star wars galaxy but okay lucas carefully considered the advancement of technology like any world builder should how did disney carry on his legacy it is now decades after the originals any good world builder would see that and consider it open season to show us how technology has advanced since then how did disney do this they added in speeders which have tracks this is so dumb for so many reasons like i'm just gonna have a mini run about specifically these speeders because it pisses me off so much in return of the jedi we see the stormtroopers have hovering speeders and they travel extremely fast and the major reason why is because they have zero contact with the ground therefore they have zero friction it's impressive technology but decades later the stormtroopers have somehow lost this technology even though the random cheap junkyard vehicle they're chasing has that technology okay let's just get this out of the way there's a reason why cars you see on the street aren't made with tank tracks there's a reason why when ferrari releases their next model the lower half doesn't look like a bloody sherman it's because when it comes to building speed tracks are the worst possible option because they have a huge amount of surface area touching the ground therefore they have a huge amount of friction therefore they move really really slowly and that's not to mention the safety issues i mean what happens if an object obstructs the treads i mean that could easily happen why it could kill the occupants of the vehicle and oh what do you know it does but okay okay let's give disney the benefit of the doubt let's let's see if there's a good reason for this sudden regression of technology let's look into the law okay right the star wars wiki page the first order tread speeders were rugged shielded patrol speeder bikes which had a design that granted great attraction on unstable terrain two of these speeders could be carried on board and that granted great attraction on unstable terrain hold on a second let's look at return on the jedi real quick over there tomorrow that right there shows that speeders have incredibly good handling so why the hell would they need great attraction especially since they're called speeders and their whole purpose is for pursuits and they need to build speed especially since we've already seen hovering vehicles perform quite well on santa for in star wars replacing hovering speeders with treaded ones is literally a downgrade in every way like it is inconceivable that a first order engineer designed this monstrosity of a vehicle and his superior didn't immediately slap him in the head for creating a design so catastrophically dumb as this one i can only guess that abrams chose to downgrade the star wars tech not for the sake of consistency or making the world interesting he only did it because he thought it looked cool like on one side we have a world where every piece of technology is carefully considered where for every minute of screen time it feels like there are 10 pages of lore written up for it like for every inch of the iceberg we see it feels like there are 10 more beneath the water line and for the sequels it feels like for every minute of screen time it has 10 words of law written up for it and i'm sorry i i'm sorry but my achilles heel in fiction is bad world building like nothing boils my blood faster than not just a world that's boring but on top of that a world that makes no sense like let me just let me just say that styles has made me really quite mad these past few years let me just put that out there um we'll talk about the grand scheme whirl building in a moment and how it affects the whole overall story but right now i'm pissed off and i'm just gonna tear through this dumb stupid world and you can't stop me let's forget about all of the external novels and comics for just one second i am speaking to the people who have seen just the films and not read the books which is the overwhelming majority of you i'm gonna give you a quiz a nice fun quiz so get your pens ready get your paper out and let's see how many of you can get these questions right it's the first order a fairly small government with control over just a handful of systems or is the first order a massive empire that has control over nearly the entire star wars galaxy you don't know the answer do you like it's an extremely important question and it's never actually addressed in any of the three movies i mean if they're just a small government with only control over a handful of systems how could they have the resources to build starkiller base that makes no sense therefore they simply have to be a large empire but if they are this large empire why would they build a death star because they know that they're a massive waste of time and resources because all they ever do is get blown up the second they get finished so why would they waste so much time and money into one super weapon when they could instead use those same resources to build tens of thousands of ships and just invade the galaxy in the traditional way and if they do it that way they get to keep all the resources on the planet instead of you know blowing it all up why didn't the first order build a larger navy instead of starkiller base it's a good question and you don't know the answer to it do you when the empire was destroyed in return of the jedi and the republic became the main galactic power how and why did the republic allow the first order to rise and become as powerful as it did you don't know the answer do you and frankly i'm getting quite tired of saying that phrase at this point but sure we can guess we can say well the first order exists therefore the republic must have let it happen we can assume that much but how did it happen and the reason why this pisses me off isn't because it's a hole in the world it's because it's such low hanging fruit for a really interesting bit of world building if any decent fantasy or sci-fi writer were telling this story that would probably be the very first question they'd address did the republic echo a post-world war one mentality and pull a neville chamberlain did the first order incrementally invade system after system but the republic let it happen because these systems weren't a part of the republic and their leader was so afraid of another war that he just turned a blind eye or offered appeasement after each invasion if they conveyed that in the movies it would have done such a wonderful job at giving the world more depth and they didn't have to info dump that honest they could have at least hinted at it with a few lines of dialogue here and there about how the republic are spineless and they're too afraid to set up to the first order whenever they invade somewhere or something like that how did the first order rise it's such a basic question and sure it's said that luke skywalker has vanished and in his absence the first order has risen from the empire's ashes but that's the full extent of the answer we get in the films and sure it's touched on some of the external media but 99 of the people watching these movies don't read the books therefore the movies need to stand on their own and cover these questions independently because if they don't the world building will feel shallow and dull which it turns out is exactly what happened i swear it feels like abrams and johnson made their films without any regard for making the world being either consistent or interesting and after the fact there was a team of writers in the disney office scrambling to try and plug the holes in the world that both directors created and it feels like they tried really quite hard to convince the fans that the world actually has some depth and isn't as shallow as it appears in the films all in all that's probably exactly what happened but okay here's a really good one like this is the worst offender out of the lot in the force awakens when the first order blows up five planets and murders tens of billions of people what are the consequences of that uh did it crash the galactic economy if five countries on earth just vanished it would be a safe bet that that would do all kinds of damage to the earth's economy did anyone declare war on the first order because of their use of starkula base or was everyone scared by the first order so they didn't declare war we don't know billions of people were murdered and it wasn't even acknowledged in the sequels but okay to parallel this with the real world imagine if north korea is like the first order okay never mind they don't you don't need to imagine that because they basically are but imagine if out of nowhere they decided to nuke five neighbouring countries and completely erase them into ash and then immediately after some insurgents come and they destroyed the country's entire nuke stockpile like the rebels do when they take out starkiller base how would the other countries on earth react to this where mr un's country has made a clear attempt to destroy and or subjugate the rest of the world but right after their main deterrent as to why people shouldn't declare war on them is completely destroyed what would china and the usa and the uk do in such a scenario well it's a pretty easy answer every single nation would declare all-out war in this country to take them out as fast as humanly possible before they can rebuild their arsenal and resume being a threat that's what would happen in reality and this presents a pretty obvious question one starkiller base was destroyed what's the main reason why everyone was afraid to fight the first order was gone why didn't every single nation every single planet in the star wars galaxy form a coalition military to wipe out the first order during the phase where they had no deterrent against doing so you don't know the answer do you i mean you can guess we can stab in the dark and come up with 23 different answers as to why the first order is miraculously undestroyed by the time the last jedi begins all of those guesses would be equally as possible but we'd have to guess because it's a major consequence of the first film that was completely ignored in the follow-up movies i swear the star wars galaxy feels so small now it doesn't feel like it's this place with tons of nations and factions with interesting dynamics it's just the first order and it's just the rebels and asides from them there is nobody else i mean i hate to do it okay that's actually a lie i'd love to do it but let's get our marker pens out how can we address this whole in the world about the consequences of blowing up those five planets what i think would have been a neat touch is during the last jedi we make it clear that the first order is currently at war with the republic in retaliation for them blowing up five of their colonies and maybe when finn goes to kanto bites he has to sneak past the front lines of a space battle between the first order and the new republic and when he's on the ground he sees flashing lasers in the sky as because of the first order's use of starkiller base a coalition navy spearheaded by the republic is waging war on them before they can rebuild their super weapon in the last jedi when they're chasing the rebels one of the officers says that they need to wipe these rebels out as quickly as possible because the first order is engaging the republic's third fleet in the naboo system and they're in dire need of reinforcements and then snoke reaffirms this by saying to hux that the republic is retaliating after you know blowing up five of their planets and murdering billions of innocent civilians in fact they're all rather upset about the whole thing if you could deal with those pesky rebels and free up your ships and reinforce the front lines immediately that would be just fine and then when hux fails to do it snoke arrives himself to personally deal with the situation because they really want the last of these rebels destroyed but it's also really important that they get these ships free asap so they can reinforce the front line and assist in the war effort would you look at that by adding in just a few lines of dialogue a few conversations between snoke and hux and a brief 20 second sequence as finn slips past the front lines of a battle the world is immediately more interesting and immediately has more depth as we show that there is in fact a wider galaxy than just what we're seeing and then this can carry on in the right of skywalker here's a good question the rise of skywalker when palpatine offered kylo all of those ships why did he need those ships why did kylo actually want to have palpatine's navy because he has already got a navy and he's already quite powerful already kind of a weak motivation so we can improve kylo's motivation for that whilst also improving the world building because palpatine's offer is kylo's last hope for turning the tides in this war because the rest of the galaxy has rallied behind the republic and they've destroyed the majority of the first order's navy between the two films kylo needs these ships to help in the war effort otherwise the first order is finished that right there is a nice improvement i think on the overall world building all this does is highlight how little johnson and abrams cared about world building because it would have required such little effort to answer all of these questions and flesh the world out they didn't do a bad job with the world building because in order to do a bad job you must first try to do that job and the unfortunate truth is is that world building often does more than just enhance a story good world building also allows the audience to understand why everyone's fighting what they're fighting for and it does more than just capture the audience's imaginations it also gives the audience the tools they need in order to care and i would explain this more but a youtuber space doc who makes some really good sci-fi videos has already explored this topic really quite well if you want to check his channel out there is a link down below but here's a clip from his video on the issue without reading external expanded universe content it's extremely difficult to figure out what the resistance even is what the first order is and where it came from and even with that expanded content there's very little context and both sides seem to be very lacking in any kind of ideology and i think this problem stems from a sort of unfair widespread opinion of the prequel movies i suspect it's generally bounced around a lot that people didn't like the politics in the star wars prequels so if they want to take a step back on the politics i understand that but i suspect they may have taken a step back so massive that it's now quite difficult to tell what's happening the original trilogy gave us just about enough context to know what was going on without getting swamped in tax negotiations and stuff but either way it gives you the feeling that the first order and the resistance are just these two gangs having an irrelevant fight out in the middle of nowhere you don't get the feeling that any of this is contributing to the overall galactic picture even when the opening crawl assures you that it is even if you completely diminish the political side of the story as much as you can to remove as much content perceived to be boring as possible you have to leave some context behind otherwise it's three hours of people fighting for nothing because we have such a lack of world building it not only makes the world itself way more boring but it removes the context we need in order to care okay markup pen time there are two questions that the force awakens doesn't answer and as a result it strips us of the context we need abrams doesn't explain how powerful the first order is and he doesn't explain why they built starkiller base and to answer these questions all they needed to do was add two short scenes and i know that sounds like a stupidly small amount of scenes to fix these issues and make the world way more interesting but that really was all they needed and let's see how they play out so near the start of the film we add a scene where kylo ren is acting as an emissary for the first order and he's having a face-to-face meeting with the president of the new republic but before it we establish in that call with stoke that kylo needs to secure this trade deal because no one wants to do business with the first order even though the old empire was destroyed decades ago and they're nowhere near as powerful as the old empire was the people of the galaxy still view them as that empire and they're completely cut off from the wider galaxy because no one wants anything to do with them then this president offers them a major trade deal that might just be their lucky break into finally becoming a relevant faction again so kylo's there desperate to iron out this deal and all is going fine until the president pulls a u-turn and says oh he'll sign the deal of course once the first order pledges to completely demilitarize and then kylo's face just drops what he thought was the first order's lucky break into becoming politically relevant again was in fact a scheme by the republic to get them to reduce their military power akalu of course says no and the president just laughs in his face and says that his first order is a relic of the way things used to be what do you have 20 systems half of which about to collapse how many of your citizens are starving right now because instead of feeding them you and snoke are secretly building that navy kylo says nothing but his poker face falters with just the slightest hint of surprise oh you think i didn't know you think my intelligence offices are so inept that none of them would notice how you've been mining and importing billions of tons of jurisdil there's only one reason why you're building a navy in secret aren't you kylo again says nothing besides the president continues even if you weren't breaking the treaty by building up your own forces my voters still hate your first order there's no way i'd be seen doing a deal with you that is unless you pledge to demilitarize he says that if kylo does that he can spin it in a way or it looks like the president caused it to happen and it will make him look great in the eyes of his allies and the public he is up for re-election later this year after all and as the president has this mini monologue kylo hasn't said a thing he's simply been gripping his hand and managing his rage he finally says he won't sign that deal then kylo stands up to leave the barely held fury visible in his twitching face but just as he's about to step outside the president smiles and says give it two months and you'll be desperate for a deal half as good as this who knows maybe once your struggling economies completely crashing you're begging on your knees i might be feeling generous and then kylo just snaps he turns around and says darkly mr president by the end of the week you'll be the one who's begging and before he can ask what the hell that means kylo storms out and then far later in the film we get a really cool payoff for that scene as once they've used starkiller base to destroy a colony of the new republic that's right not five whole planets because that's ridiculous overkill he just destroys one insignificant one with maybe the population of a few million to prove the station's capabilities kailu has a hollow call with the president that he spoke to before and he says there's still plenty of charge in his station's core if he doesn't surrender immediately he'll destroy mandalore a far more populated republic planet he demands that they reopen talks for that trade deal and he expects the president to be far more generous with his terms anything the president stutters terrified oh and one more thing jakar says kylo jakar master president when i was a child jakar was nothing but a lifeless rock but i hear the republic's been terraforming it for habitation from what i understand the terraforming completed just months ago and the first colonists are about to arrive give it to me what cries the president we spent 20 trillion credits terrifying jakarta are you insane then kylo turns the man behind him commander ready starkiller to destroy mandalore and the president screams out a plea for him to stop and agrees to evacuate his people from jakarta and give the planner over to the first order then kylo says and one more thing what says the president on the brink of a nervous breakdown beg what beg and then the president gets on his knees and cries for mercy and kylo delivers on that threat when he said that by the end of the week he'll be the one who's begging like if the force awakens had just those two scenes like maybe some people wouldn't have liked the politics i i do get that but i think they would have done a brilliant job at adding depth to this world at showing there's a wider galaxy out there and how powerful the first order is and why they built starkiller base in all of those questions so they can go from an insignificant government to a sudden superpower as anyone who defies them gets obliterated but anyway in summary sequel world bad and now on to part three a confused vision and an arsenal of unfired chekov's guns i trust you fired that chekov's gun a half edition what do you mean by this one and what is this if there's one tip i'd give out to anyone writing a story that spans several installments it would be to make a plan sure some people do prefer to improvise their story as it goes along but when you're telling a series of connected stories where you write the first release it then write the second and so on and you do all that with no plan this can be extremely risky because when you do it this can result in you having a whole armory of unfired chekhov's guns that you promised in the first story would have a payoff later on down the line but you end up never firing them or when you do fire them it's like a damp squib because the payoff was nowhere near as good as you promised it would be jj abrams sorry guys i've got very bad cough today but when you tell a series of stories without a plan it can result in you having mysteries which have thoroughly disappointing answers and character arcs that lead to nowhere but when you tell a story without a plan and on top of that you have a tug of war between two directors fighting to tell their version of the story you get the star wars sequel trilogy the post child of why when writing a series you need to know what direction you're headed in again even though the prequels were heavily criticized at the very least they had a consistent vision lucas knew exactly what his end point was and every step of the story was him working towards it and i think the best example of one of the many unfired chekhov's gun in this trilogy is finn and the idea of him being a defecting stormtrooper the force awakens was extremely derivative but we've never really seen a stormtrooper's side of the story it is a fresh twist that helped the only fresh twist the sequels had and if we had like a thorough exploration of how a stormtrooper thinks and works how they operate what their tactics are what it's like to be a defector what it's like for finn to kill people knowing that beneath that helmet is a human who is exactly like the person he used to be finn had near limitless potential to be a fascinating character but he was given no exploration although actually that's saying that is too generous because not only is the idea of him being a stormtrooper unexplored it's completely forgotten about for example considering that finn was once one of them he should feel really quite conflicted when he takes the life of a stormtrooper instead whenever he kills one of them he reacts like this jj abrams you had one good idea one genuinely creative idea that could have resulted in a really interesting character and you wasted it although johnson wasted it too so you're not the only one at fault here jj abrams introduced the chekhov's gun of a defecting stormtrooper promising the audience that it would be fired but he ended up losing that chekov's gun down the back of the sofa and then he forgot where it was in fact if in the force awakens finn was just some random dock worker who decided to join the rebels the next two films would have required basically no changes because they would have made the exact same amount of sense that's one example of one of the many many broken promises throughout this trilogy but of course it's not just about broken promises it is about a confused vision and well a great example of that would be in the force awakens and how it's clearly set up that kylo ren wants nothing more than to live up to darth vader's legacy and i will finish what you started you're afraid that you will never be as strong as darth vader but in the very next film kylo says let the past time kill it if you have to this was a really poorly handled aspect of kylo's character and it happened partly because there was no plan but mostly because the directors wanted two different things in one film he has a tremendous respect for darth vader's legacy so much so that he models his appearance and modulates his voice to be more like him and in the very next film he's abandoned all of that and is preaching about how you shouldn't care about the past and why has kylo done a complete change in his aspirations well it's because at the start of the last jedi snoke said take that off and that's it because snoke had a go at kylo that one time kylo's character did a complete and instant u-turn in what he wanted in life the problem isn't the change in itself because characters who undergo arcs will always have changing opinions and wants as time goes along it's instead with how quickly the change happened he suddenly hates his past and suddenly wants to be his own man at the beginning of the second movie like a way better execution of this arc would be if kylo spends the whole of the force awakens trying to be like darth vader then in the last jedi he's trying and failing to be like darth vader perhaps he's trying to intimidate people and it's not working or what i think would be a better choice is he makes a decision because he thinks that that's the decision darth vader would have made but it ends up going horribly wrong for him and as a result it gives him this crisis of faith because his whole identity is based on being like darth vader but now he realizes that he isn't darth vader so who is he he doesn't know and towards the end of the second film kylo has this crisis of faith that prompts him to go on a journey of self-discovery throughout the rest of the second film and the whole of the third film until in the very climax of the last film he finally realizes who he is and decides to denounce being the next vader decides to be his own man and turns to the light side if as a result of his trilogy wide arc he turns to the light side that would have made his whole journey so much more compelling than it was and it's been said that when abrams handed over the reigns to johnson at the end of the force awakens that he gave johnson some notes on what he had been planning for the sequels and it's pretty clear that this was one of those things on the list like in the force awakens abrams was clearly setting up like the foundation for this kind of arc for kylo as he goes on this journey of self-discovery but instead of you know carrying on with it and giving his character a nice through line johnson was like nafam and ruined kylo's arc not because he thought it would make kylo more interesting but because johnson wanted kylo to embody his message of letting the past die rey is also another great example of a confused vision so in the last jedi it gets revealed that her parents were nobodies and this was a slightly controversial thing at the time but by itself i think it could have been brilliant this is a crushing moment for rey and it changes her trajectory in what she wants however i do think that this moment had a really poor groundwork laid for it if in the force awakens it would have undoubtedly made this more powerful if rey makes a massive deal about who her parents are she says at three separate points in the film that she just knows her parents are important she just knows that she was put on that planet for a reason maybe it was to keep her safe because they were being hunted by someone maybe it was to stop her from fulfilling her destiny she doesn't know why she was put there but she desperately wants to leave the planet go find her parents and figure out this grand mystery no one's ever told her that she was put there for a reason she just grew to believe it and she's built her whole life and identity around this quest of finding her legacy if that groundwork were laid in the force awakens like if they knew what direction they were going with her character that would have made this reveal in the last jedi of her deadbeat parents work so much better but this reveal works okay as is it could have definitely been done better but now we've raised the question of how is she gonna define who she is when she has no legacy it is an interesting question that could have been a fascinating character exploration in the third film but wait there's more forget everything that i just said because it's all been thrown completely out the window as abrams has just stabbed johnson's ray reveal in the back rey's character progression has been completely invalidated in this tug of war of creative control because sure her parents were nobodies but her granddad was palpatine and because of this constant back and forth rey has no through line throughout the trilogy like if they went down the path of rey's parents being nobodies that could have worked really well as she struggled to find her place in life without the legacy that she falsely believed she had if they went down the path of rey having a heritage of evil like her granddad was a monster and she learns that her parents were monsters too as they abandoned her not because they wanted to keep her safe but because they forgot about her and they just couldn't be bothered to go back and collect her and they just left her for dead perhaps both her parents are a pair of ruthless bounty hunters who have killed a lot of good people now rey struggles to prove to not just other people like luke but to herself that she won't fall to being as evil as her heritage says she should be and in the trilogy we have this whole exploration of nature verse nurture can someone come of a place of pure evil and become a genuinely good person if they went down either of those two paths it could have worked really well the problem was that they went down both and rey's journey ends up being this confused mess and there are so so many examples of how the creative differences between johnson and abrams ruin the consistency of this trilogy like i'll brush over a handful of them fairly quickly like edward was intended the antagonist of the trilogy to be snoke and johnson killed him and sure some people really did like the fact that snoke was suddenly and unexpectedly killed but the issue is that johnson left no viable alternative for the main bad guy in the third film it can't be hux because he's been turned into a joke it can't be kylo because rey's kicked his ass in every single fight they've had and he has a fairly minimal menacing presence and on top of that disney clearly wanted kylo to be redeemed in the end to give jj some credit he was left in an impossible situation because now the main bad guy is dead and there's no one left to replace him so abrams resurrected palpatine a move that had zero foreshadowing and came out of nowhere but abram's hand was forced by johnson's because he really was pushed into a corner with nowhere else to go in terms of who's going to be the main villain and do you want to know the cost of subverted expectations well that right there is the cost and another example is luke in the last jedi luke is this dark cynical prick but in the rise of skywalker he's suddenly the very luke we know from the originals when rey comes up to his force ghost he's smiling and supportive and is nothing like he was in the last jedi and the reason why he's suddenly back to how he was in the originals isn't because his character learned a lesson it's because abrams didn't like the fact he was a cynic so he again tugged the rope back to his side of the line and did a u-turn with luke's personality and god there are so so many inconsistencies another one in the end of the last jedi there's a big point made that they're waiting for reinforcements to come for the people of the galaxy to show that they care and to come to their rescue and they never do it's proven that no one cares about the rebellion and they want to let them die but in the sequel we have the exact same story beat where they're waiting for the reinforcements and a whole armada arrives but instead of this being exciting it's just head scratching because these are the people that didn't show up in the last film so why are they suddenly turning up now and there are so many inconsistencies and broken promises but i feel like my head's about to explode so let's move on the sequel star wars trilogy was a complete waste of potential it could have been so much more and that leads us to part four a better story up until this point i've done nothing but explain why the sequels were bad but now i'm going to try and pitch an alternate story and let me stress that this isn't supposed to be a fix for the story we got because you fix a story in the same way that you fix a car when it's a small crash or only one or two parts needs to be replaced you replace them with the star wars sequels it's you know when a car is so completely totaled that there's no point fixing it and you might as well just get a new one that's what the sequels are so this is a complete rewrite but i will be making an active effort to carry over some of the characters and whatnot so i thought instead of me just listing off all the plot points i thought it would be fun for me to do a sort of dramatic outline where i'll flesh out several plots and key scenes but summarize some others so sit back kick up your feet and i hope you enjoy it so first off let's set up the scene in the opening title cruel it says that war is waging between the first order and the new republic in this new story kylo has the same role that he does in the originals he is the apprentice of the leader of the first order but instead of the first order leader being snoke that role is taken by a woman we'll call darth khan the empress of the first order and she is pure evil like no ifs or buts about it she is not a morally complex villain she is just a tyrant who rules with fear like your proper evil sith lord she'll speak like a kindly smiling mother offering sympathy one moment then flay you around with her mind the next when the empire was crumbling after the emperor's death this woman this darth khan came out of the woodworks and held the empire's last fragments together under all the infighting and she reforged it all into the first order and under her leadership over these past two decades the first order has been steadily growing in strength and now the political tension is at a boiling point as a fierce brutal war is being waged between the new republic and the first order but i know what you might be thinking what's the twist like how is this new story taking the star wars formula in a new direction well hold on for a moment because we'll get there soon enough so after the first credits roll we panned down to see the opening shot a grand space battle between the republic and the first order around a red giant sun we see it through the eyes of poe as he isn't a rebel fighter in this he is a republic star pilot and his squadron are flying circles around the thai fighters and they're almost single-handedly winning the battle we established right at the start that pose squad are all incredible pilots then kylo who's been observing the battle in his bridge gets into his fighter and he just obliterates them one by one kylo alone takes out these ace pilots until it's just po left all the while the epic space battle is still raging on in the background one thing we show is that even though kylo steamrolled the other rebels who were all really good pilots poe is giving him a real run for his money like we have something in this opening scene that we've never actually seen before in a star wars film a dog fight between two of the galaxy's best pilots there are a ton of twists and turns they're not just flying around aimlessly but they're doing incredibly complex maneuvers that we've never seen before kylo is closing in behind poe to finish the kill when post spins his craft around and while flying backwards shoots at kylo force him to break off and then a split second left before pose rear crashes into a starship's hull he recovers control of the ship and flies through a tight space and goes to re-engage kylo instead of just being told that poe is a good pilot where people scream [Music] we see that while every other pilot just gets steamrolled poe is actually keeping up with this sith lord kylo in this intense fight between the two and as kylo and poe charge towards each other their thumbs on the triggers as they ready to open up and see who's the best once and for all the hot crimson light from the nearby red giant suddenly stops a shadow is cast over them both and both kylo and po look up to see the red sun be eclipsed by a ship of terrifying size it hovers there for a moment then blasts out a great green pulse and every ship dies every thruster stops every light in the cockpit goes off and in one instant the raging battle comes to a complete standstill but poe and kylo ships are still a collision course so they smash into each other and merge into one they get a close look at each other as their two ships are now effectively won and this lump of metal slowly but surely falls into the gravity well of a nearby planet the two grand navies break up into pieces in the atmosphere because they can't handle the strain and the last shot we see is kylo and poe they're fighters burning up upon reentry that's the first scene and then we fade to a karma shot showing a sea gently lapping at a beach then children wearing jedi clothes studying and as one continuous shot we pan up to show luke looking at his students and his jedi temple pried on his face he then looks an ancient book in his hands written in a language that we can't read but inside of it one thing we do see pretty clearly is a diagram of a giant stone door parting to reveal a pure blue line the temple was a modest place in the middle of nowhere see here's the problem when darth sidious came to power he re-wrote the history books like sure the empire's gone now and sure before order 66 the jedi were a force for good in the galaxy and yes palpatine's dead no resurrections this time but palpatine did such a good job at slandering the jedi name and erasing any record of their good deeds that people don't remember them as these peacekeeping noble knights they remember them as dark mythical monsters that kidnap children to induct them into their ranks the new republic regards the jedi with superstitious fear as does the whole galaxy and even now the republic has carried over the empire's policy of a standing bounty of a few million credits for anyone who kills or captures a jedi because of this luke has to keep his jedi order a secret he knows that if the location of his temple ever got out no end of bounty hunters would come for him and his students so they all live sequestered away on some quiet planet we want to continue luke's story in this sequel trilogy because it's a sequel and the whole point of a sequel is to continue well the story in the originals he was struggling to be the student so now it makes sense that he's struggling to be the mentor he's learning to teach these kids how to be jedi knights and he's far from perfect at it he has a few dozen students some of them are just kids some of them teenagers but two of them are young adults his older students one of which we'll call cal because i've been playing way too much jedi fall in order lately and the other is rey and we clearly established at the very start that rey is incredibly strong with the force she is talented ray and cal are sparring but rey bests him then she looks up to luke for approval but he just looks at her with a blank face and with not a hint of pride on it and we see how much this hurts ray she goes from smiling to suddenly feeling really quite depressed then luke walks up pats cow on the shoulder and says you'll do better next time and then walks off in this scene we establish that luke is a genuinely supportive mentor we see him being like yoda with the kids imparting wisdom and being a great teacher with the teenage students he's again understanding and supportive in fact he's being a genuinely great mentor to everyone except rey for some reason he treats her dispassionately as she is constantly seeking his approval constantly trying to make him proud like every other student makes him proud but he never is no matter how well she does and we end this scene by luke having an assembly with his students and saying that he's going away for a while he needs to retrieve something important the secrets of the jedi and he leaves cal in charge and while he gives cal a lot of parting advice and words of encouragement he doesn't say one word to rey not even a goodbye so then we go back to poe he's still falling into the atmosphere so he ejects from his fighter and parachutes down in a thick jungle he quickly meets a stormtrooper with a cracked helmet and they fight in a desperate battle poe nearly grabs his blaster and is just about to kill the stormtrooper when pogue suddenly freezes then flies up and hovers in the air kylo steps out from the tree line with his hand raised he is restraining poe with the force kylo quickly identifies him as the pilot he was fighting against and poe tenses he takes in a long breath readying himself to die but instead kyla reaches out and shakes poe's hand even though poe is the enemy kylo takes the moment to show respect to someone who he regards as an equal someone who is clearly incredibly skilled in a fighter even if he's on the other side of the war then they cuff po and take him as a prisoner and as i said before the stormtrooper's helmet's cracked it took too much damage in the crash and he asks kylo if he can remove it because now the hud's glitching out and it's just more annoying than it is helpful kylo gives permission and he takes it off and we reveal that it is finn in this story finn doesn't defect he's a career stormtrooper one who's fiercely loyal to the cause and a member of kylo's personal army the 5-0 first a legion reserved for the best soldiers in the whole of the first order and one drenched in bloody history and what we'll see over the course of these movies is a friendship build between poe and finn poe is fiercely loyal to the republic finn is fiercely loyal to the first order they disagree on so many things they couldn't be more different as human beings but as the movies go along they build a genuine friendship despite the great big political wedge that's between them so kylo pulls up a hollow map of his area and he sees that there are friendly life signs all over the planet it seems that a seriously large chunk of the first order's forces survived the battle and made it to the planet's surface so the three of them then make their way towards the closest life signs but then once they're wading through a thick jungle kyla brings up the map again to see where he's going and there are far fewer lights than they were before finn says it must be a glitch or maybe the iff signals are being jammed but then they realize that one by one the lights are snuffing out something is hunting and killing the survivors of the battle and then their march turns into a run and now we go back to luke one thing that i haven't mentioned before in this video and i kind of regret not doing it before but one thing that i really hated about the sequel trilogy was how it pretended that the prequels never happened like there's one moment in the last jedi where luke says at the height of their powers they allow darth sidious to rise create the empire and wipe them out and when i saw this in the cinema like no joke i genuinely got chills because it was acknowledging that the prequels actually existed which is something that i wasn't expecting like think about it this way right star wars before has been six movies and this sequel trilogy has basically completely ignored 50 of the main entries in the star wars franchise doesn't that strike you as a total waste of potential there could have been some really cool ways of giving references and exploring the world of the prequels and i thought of a pretty nice one for this so as a fix luke is on a mission to the jedi temple on coruscant and we see that the jedi temple has changed so much since we last store it it's now a museum dedicated to the heavily edited history of the jedi who once lived there and as luke walks along as a part of a tour led by a female droid guide he sees holograms of the jedi that we saw in the originals we see kit fisto and master yoda but right in the middle of this row of holograms there's this man with a snarling face and evil eyes and luke stops for a moment curious and the artificial voice from the display says that this is mace windu the single most evil jedi to have ever lived and it lists his horrific crimes and says he's a murderer and all kinds of horrible things and it says that he tried to murder palpatine in cold blood in the name of gaining more personal power it's never explicitly said but the kind of subtext behind this is that mace is the only jedi to have ever bested palpatine in single combat and the fact that mace came so close to killing him and disfigured him pissed palpatine off so much that he made sure to focus his slander on mace to edit his legacy to show him being the most despicable evil jedi to have ever lived and he did it purely out of spite so then the tour carries on and maybe we see a few easter eggs on displays here and there and it finally reaches the heart of the museum and we see this old door with archaic writings and runes engraved into the stone the very same door that we saw in that book in the opening shot with luke and the droid tour guide says that behind this door is the jedi masters holocron vault behind this door is where the jedi sword their most powerful artifacts and their most dangerous secrets the door hasn't budged in 50 years they've never been able to get in with physical force not for lack of trying there is some kind of energy about it and it can only be opened by a jedi master but the guide says the problem is that all the jedi masters died decades ago in order 66 and the secrets to opening this were lost with them it's quite possible that the vault behind those doors and all of the hidden dark secrets of the jedi behind it will be lost forever and then luke rubs his chin walks around the corner the guide goes up to him to ask where the hell he's going but she turns around the corner and there's no one there the droid seems to glitch out for a moment as her head twitches and then she says she really must be recalibrated and walks back to the group then we fade to night once everyone's gone luke jumps down from the rafters where he's been hiding the whole time he pulls out the book again from his pocket and while studying it reverently rubs the door in a specific and complex pattern for a moment nothing happens then the great stone doors grind like a pestle and mortar a bright blue light comes through the seam and illuminates luke in the pitch black luke smirks then steps inside luke's come here because he's always known that this jedi vault existed and inside is said to be a trove of hidden jedi knowledge that he would love to have so he can rebuild the order to its former glory however just like everyone else he's never been able to figure out how to get in not until he found that book and as luke is trawling around with childlike awe on his face as he goes through all of these wonders and artifacts in this perfectly preserved vote from the old jedi order something grabs his eye there's a holocron cube on a shelf and it doesn't look sinister but luke just senses something about it a disturbance in the force something about it replaces the awe on his face with terror so he reaches out and activates it a hologram appears showing a middle-aged man with a cape held by a chain his hair is largely black with just the hints of grey on the edges and on his belt is a lightsaber with a curved hilt he introduces himself as jedi master dooku and the holocron is his full report on an encounter he had in the outer rim they resurrected tarkin with cgi they can totally do that with count dooku and he tells a story and as he goes into it we have a full-on flashback to middle-aged count dooku and this takes place 10 years before the prequels even happened as he tells him there was a battle between the republic navy and a band of pirates who had been raiding nearby settlements and dooku was sent there acting as an emissary for the jedi council on a peacekeeping mission to protect the locals from the pirate scum but as the battle raged and he observed it all from a command bridge he noticed something far far away a normal human eye could never see it but with his heightened jedi senses he saw clear as day a speck of dull light from a ship's thruster against the darkness of the stars something was watching them he ordered the force can be done in its direction and the scans showed nothing was there whatever that craft was it was so advanced that it had total stealth technology and dooku wasn't aware of any craft that had that level of technology and once the battle was won the ship vanished in the blink of an eye and dooku had the most terrible feeling he didn't know why but his hair stood on their ends and he knew that whatever that thing was it was a sign of something dark and terrible beyond understanding so he went on a mission to hunt it down and after months of searching of scouring every nearby system with his jedi senses because apparently no other form of detection was good enough dooku finally sensed the very same vessel he encountered refueling on an asteroid so he snuck up used his lightsaber to gut an entry point into the hull and once he was on board he was immediately attacked by monstrous grey-skinned creatures with sharp teeth soulless eyes and the nose of a skull they had incredibly powerful weapons technology like nothing dooku had ever seen before there were only four of them but they attached with such speed and ferocity that even he a jedi master in his prime could barely keep up by the skin of his teeth he killed all but one and as he held the saber to the last creature's throat it snarled in a harsh nails on chalkboard voice your strength is weak my people are strong you can do nothing but die who are your people asks dooku and the creature with what might have been a laugh wheezes the reply the you jean fong the creature presses a button on its wrist the ship blazes in alert and dooku immediately senses that a self-destruct has been activated and with that he cuts off the creature's head dooku then escapes the craft moments before it can destroy itself and he postulates that the ship must have been some form of advanced scout what it was a scout for he couldn't possibly guess for it was clearly beyond anything previously encountered by the jedi but its purpose was obvious it was observing the battle assessing our strategies and technologies it was gathering intelligence for a force unknown a force that had to be outside the galaxy itself and dooku closes off his report by saying please forgive me master yoda i have failed you i haven't done so since i was a child but i confess myself afraid then luke hurriedly plays another holocron from the same shelf we see mace windu and master yoda walking down a corridor discussing dooku's report and they say that it's beyond troubling so they've secretly deployed 200 listing probes at the edge of the galaxy their sensors focused into the galactic void if they ever detected these so-called yu zhan vong their probes will give them an early warning and provide valuable time to prepare for what's to come then luke scrambles around the room until he eventually finds the control panel for the old jedi probes mace was talking about with a symbol on the board for each of the two hundreds and all are flashing red with an overlay text extra galactic crafts detected the yu zhan vong have arrived then we cut back to kylo poe and finn as they hurry towards the dwindling friendly life signs and they encounter those same creatures we saw in dooku's flashback and they are terrifyingly powerful and we have a great firefight between kylo these stormtroopers and these creatures okay so for those of you who don't know the yuuzhan vong are a race that already exist in star wars only they were in the legends which is the canon that disney basically retconned out of existence but they're a race of incredible power and there was this whole story arc where they invaded the star wars galaxy now what's the big twist of this trilogy in the originals you have the small powerless good guys fighting the big evil bad guys in the prequels it was the reverse of that with the good guys having all the power and the bad guys scheming to take them down well now both the good guys and the bad guys are equally as powerful but they have to work together because these invaders are monsters they're about to kill all life in the galaxy so the jedi and the sith the republic and the empire they hate each other like my god they hate each other they have so much bad blood between them but if they don't unite under this common threat they're all as good as debt i just imagine it imagine a purely evil sith lord fighting with a jedi like luke to attack a base or complete an objective and rescue prisoners just like just think about all that potential lovely conflict as they disagree on how they should do it and whether they should execute the survivors as the jedi and sith clash and hate each other but they have to work together for the common good like if you're looking for a twist from the star wars formula i think that would be perfect not that i'm cocky about my own ideas or anything and over the course of this trilogy we see this massive war play out as these impossibly powerful invaders with far more advanced technology invade the galaxy and kill everyone they come across or worse and along the way we come across han and leia and chewie and all of the old cast as they join the fight and we see how much they've changed over the years that right there is the main premise for this new trilogy but at the end of the day character is just as important as plot and let's go back to rey we're gonna flesh her out much more so throughout the whole first movie we see rey being basically like quite depressed like she feels like an outsider with no family and no friends even though she's a jedi student she looks up at the sky and fantasizes about how one day she's going to go out there and find her real family find her place in all of this luke told her one day that he opened his door to find her as a baby delivered to his doorstep with no note no anything she didn't know why she was put there or even who her parents were but she was strong with the force so he took her in as a student but rey says she just knows her legacy is one of grandeur she just knows that her parents were brilliant people and she was put in the jedi temple for a reason she just needs to find out what that reason is if she could find out the reason why her parents left her in the jedi temple that will be the key to finding her place in life but as i said earlier luke doesn't trust rape like he clearly has no faith in her as a person and gradually her angst about this builds up until just at the start of the second film rey snaps she demands to know why her best is never good enough well he seemingly hates her even though she's never done anything wrong to him and at her angry outburst he gulps with fear and finally tells her the story about kylo ren he says that ren used to be a pupil of luke's and he was like rey in so many ways like luke says whenever he saw kylo he saw the darkness in him just like there's a darkness in rey except luke reveals that kylo ren is more than just some random padawan he is the grandson of the emperor himself and luke accepted him knowing that he was palpatine's grandson knowing that he had a heritage of evil but still the optimistic luke skywalker who he knew at the return of the jedi had total faith in kylo luke nurtured kylo taught him everything he knew and he doesn't say it but by the way that luke tells the story it's clear that luke loved him like he was his own son and it plays out like that fix i suggested earlier in the video one day when luke was away on some adventure kylo murdered the rest of luke's students and burnt his temple to the graft it turns out that darth khan the leader of the first order found a way to commune with kylo from inside the temple walls and this woman of pure evil corrupted kylo and led him to the dark side and sure luke is someone of incredible persistence he has an iron will he didn't let this tragedy and betrayal destroy him he rebuilt the temple in a new location and took in new students but the betrayal soured him not completely he is still the same luke we knew he's just a little more pessimistic is a little more reluctant to see the good in people and after his faith and kylo was portrayed how could he ever have faith again especially in rey especially because every time he sees her he doesn't just see the same darkness that was in kylo he sees a worse version of it and out of every pupil that luke has ever had ray by far has the greatest darkness inside of them and so then rave shocked unfeeling no idea what to think says so why did you take me in if from the start all you ever saw was evil in me why didn't you just send me a way to live somewhere else and luke doesn't say a thing but on his face is a look of pure shame and we get a very strong sense that there's more to this story again going on the ray we saw in the first film she is desperate to know her heritage she believes that knowing why she was sent to the temple will be the key to knowing her place in the world and she begs at luke who am i who were my parents and again he doesn't say a word and then rey firms her lip and says there's a war going on i'm going to join it and she's something along the lines of wherever my home is my real home it's not here and at the beginning of the second movie rey runs away to help in the war effort and fight the yu zhang vong sure enough rey ends up meeting kylo ren and we see a jedi and a sith fighting together back to back against these invading aliens but here's the kicker kylo sees how talented rey is and he starts giving her advice he says her sword form is all wrong that's not how you use form three this is and he imparts all the wisdom that luke taught him kylo a sith lord actually shows more faith in rey than luke ever did and she finally feels happier than she's ever felt before in her life as she feels like she's finally found a mentor who actually cares about who she is as a person but all the while she's falling to the dark side luke intentionally didn't teach rey about the dark side because luke had some sort of misguided belief that the less she knew about the dark side the less likely she was to fall to it but now we see that luke has failed to be a good mentor because she's not equipped enough to realize that she's fallen to the dark side because she doesn't really know what it is what the symptoms of it are and all of that and what we've got to remember is that this is still luke's story he has his own journey and once he's heard about what's happened to rey that she is now essentially kylo ren's padawan he slumps down incredibly depressed knowing that he's failed again that another student of his has fallen to the dark he is so miserable here but then a force ghost comes along in a brown jedi robe and with aging ginger hair he's slightly older than we remember it's owen mcgregor's obi wan and he sits down and gives luke a talk all of a sudden it's like luke's not a mentor anymore like he's back to being a student and he voices his doubts and obi-wan gives him some advice obi-wan seems pained and with difficulty he says did i ever tell you about how your father became darth vader luke looks at him confused enthralled and obi-wan says he had a vision a vision of your mother padme dying in childbirth and he became so afraid of her death that he did everything he could to stop it and your mother died not because of childbirth but because in anakin's search for ways to defy the prophecy he became a monster that she could no longer love and without the person he used to be she had no reason left to live if anakin had never had those visions if he had never known the future that very future would have never happened as obi-wan says this he's at the brink of tears because recalling those days brings him so much pain and he finally says the prophecy only became true because your father believed that it would and luke shock in his eyes whispers out i failed her and obi-wan's somberly nods and luke ends the talk finally realizing that he has been a terrible mentor that he's lost faith in the good in people and because of his failure he has forced rey into the path of falling to the dark side and now luke becomes determined to fix it to go after he and support her to be the mentor that he always should have been to win her back and as luke strides away determined to right his wrongs obi-wan begins to fade but before he fully disappears he says and luke tell her the truth the whole truth so then later in the second movie luke confronts rey but it's not easy she has really grown to resent him but he apologizes confesses that he has been a terrible mentor and luke finally reveals that he liked her all along but he lied to protect her the truth that her mother is darth khan the single most evil person in the galaxy he reveals that her mother loved her more than anything but she was kidnapped by a defecting imperial officer who wanted to put a spanner in her plans and this imperial officer after kidnapping rey as a baby tracked down luke and gave her to him and he made luke promise that he would take care of her but he reveals that rey's original purpose in life was to be groomed to be the next darth khan to be her apprentice and this shakes ray to her core because like we've established before that she hates darth khan like ray knows the terrible deeds she's done and we've made it a point that ray just despises that woman truly regards her as a monster but now she's turned out to be rey's mother the person she's always wanted nothing more than to meet and love what does rey do it's been an established point that the jedi are viewed as these monsters but luke comes along does incredibly heroic deeds in the war and convinces people to believe in the jedi once more and luke dies in a heroic sacrifice that proves to the galaxy as a whole that the jedi are not what palpatine wanted everyone to think they are here's the thing yes luke's died and it's twisted to look like a hopeful moment as he inspires the galaxy to believe again but we end the second movie of rey approaching this darth khan unsure of herself twiddling her fingers and unsure of whether she should be ready for a fight or ready to love her rey reveals who she is and khan immediately drops her lightsaber and crushes rey in a hug as she condenses every hug a mother might give over a childhood into one and we end the second film of them both embracing each other the daughter and mother reunited and rey decides to embrace her legacy and join her mother on the dark side and in the third film is where the war wraps up and despite the horrific costs they've defeated the yuuzhan vong once and for all but rey is really falling to the dark side like she is inches away from becoming a fully fledged sith lord her mother loves rey completely and together they form a great and terrifying team and while darth khan treats literally everyone else horribly she treats rey like the most valuable person in the world and the love between them is really quite clear and we see how kylo ren has basically been sidelined ever since rey's come back to darth khan because now khan has her daughter back kylo was essentially always her surrogate heir but now she's got her daughter back why the hell would she need kylo like so she just waves him away as khan gives all of her focus and love and attention to rey but here's the thing because now kylo is distance from khan like now he has independence and no one is looming over him and making decisions for him kylo realizes that he hates who he is all the while khan is treating rey all kinds of crazy sith powers like force lightning and so on but just before rey commits her first act of true evil and falls to the dark side completely she finally learns about her father rey's father was the irrelevant imperial officer that kidnapped her as a baby and gave her to luke she learns that khan captured him after he did it and tortured him and she put him through the most brutal agonizing horrors anyone can imagine and many horrors that nobody can but after all the most horrible tortures in the galaxy he never gave him because he loved his daughter and he knew what would happen to her if he said the truth and she learns that her father a man who she loves desperately despite never meeting him wanted nothing more for her than to defy her legacy to be the opposite of her evil mother in fact he wanted her to do that so much that he was willing to give his life in order for her to have that chance and this shakes rei like she begins to realize that legacy shouldn't define who she is and maybe she should be her own person and she sees herself her red lightsaber her pale face and she realizes that she has essentially become a carbon copy of her sith mother she is not rey anymore she is darth khan just a younger version of her she is the monster that her father gave his life so she might have a chance at not being what she is now and while this is happening kylo is also undergoing his arc as he's now free of the influence of darth khan and while all this is going on like cal that other older jedi student he's died and in cal's dying breath he tells kylo the location of luke's new jedi temple and says that they have no leader but instead of going there to capture all the students to convert them into being sith he goes there to rescue all of these padawans before the yu zhang vong can reach them and once kylo's hid them all away in a nice quiet safe corner of the galaxy and is fully back to the light he goes on a mission to kill darth khan and rid the galaxy of her evil once and for all and we echo the very end of return of the jedi here kylo tries to kill her but khan is just too powerful and kylo gets disarmed and is being electrocuted by khan he's about to die and then rey makes her choice she raises her saber to her mother to stand up to her legacy and we have a final epic fight between rey and her mother before darth khan is killed once and for all and we end on a note where the first order has been essentially completely destroyed and due to luke's heroic sacrifice and how he's changed people's perception of the jedi the republic has agreed to give the temple back to the students and with the republic's blessings kylo and rey moved back to the original temple with the rest of luke's padawans with both of them back on the light we see stewards and republic soldiers wheeling away and taking down all the museum displays as the museum is now being repurposed back to being a temple but now because the first order's been destroyed what's gonna happen to finn because he was loyal to their cause but now they're completely gone and he's without a job without a leader without an army to be a part of but then kylo goes up to finn and offers him a position as being a guard in the new jedi temple and so now finn and poe are part of the security team protecting the temple this is just one spitballing solution it doesn't have to be exactly this and on the very final shot of the third film we see rey and kylo mentoring these students and teaching them lessons when rey looks up to a ledge and a dozen force ghosts appear we see yoda and obi-wan and mace windu and qui-gon and anakin but right in the middle is luke his face finally gleaming with the pride that she always wanted he nods at rey she nods back and we see the ghosts of the old jedi masters looking on with pride at the next generation at a new golden era of the jedi about to begin then the credits roll if you ask me that would have been a much better sequel trilogy what do you think did you like my pitch or do you think there's something about it that can be improved i'd love to know what you think in the comments down below anyway thanks for sticking to the end this video please do support me on patreon if you haven't already and i'll see you guys next time on the closer look

Channel: The Closer Look

Views: 2,498,673

Rating: 4.8408566 out of 5

Keywords: star wars, star, wars, rey, snoke, luke, skywalker, rewrite, trilogy, sequel, finn, worldbuilding, the closer look, the closer, closer look, the last jedi, jedi, Disney, video essay, video, essay, rise of skywalker, rise of, Lucas, George Lucas, rian johnson, jj abrams, darth, vader, palpatine, darth vader, prequel, prequels

Id: ywT7arOAnc4

Length: 103min 33sec (6213 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 05 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/ludwigritcher752]

He said "Rian's massage of letting the past die". I don't need to say anything else.

[u/nachoolo]

I cringed the very moment I saw that in my feed.

There's a diference between not liking a film or two (which, btw, were big fucking successes when it comes to revenue), and thinking that a franchise is dying.

There's new series, books, comics, and fucking games still coming out. Taika Watiti has been confirmed to be directing a new film, with Rian Johnson working on a future trilogy. Thinking that the franchise is dead is completely mental and deeply worrisome.

EDIT: The worst if that the twat is making the "it's not for the true fans" argument but saying that true fans would care about worldbuilding (and not themes). Fuck. He's saying that The Last Jedi is the less "for the fans" film of the trilogy just because it doesn't follow their narrow view on worldbuilding (which is based more on half-truths and ignoring the actual lore of the series). Fucking the Last Jedi is the one more interested in the previous films of the three, is just that it is interested in the mythos and themes of the series instead of the (shallow) worldbuilding that these type of fans like. The type of fans (to put another franchise example) that doesn't pay any attention to the politics and themes of Strat Trek--the thing that interested the creators and was the centre of the series--to instead pay attention to the ship designs and battles in it. Same with Luke. They care about Luke doing cool stuff in the Original Trilogy. Not in his arc and struggles and how they connect to the thems of the story (the thing that interested Lucas).

Hell. We can even take it to the Prequels. The majority of their fandom doesn't care about the themes and politics of the trilogy (the actual good thing about them), but the cool fights and "badass" Jedi. They cared about the Maul fight, Anakin killing Dooku, Obi-Wan vs Anakin, etc. instead of the Rise of Palpatine and the parallelism found in real life, how Anakin was manipulated into falling into the Dark Side and how this is a metaphor of how fascist regimes lure young men, how the orthodoxy of the Jedi and their continuous intervention on politics brought their downfall, etc.

If your definition of "fan" is to launch hypothetical questions that centre on meaningless worldbuilding (that actually cares little about the actual world), then you're just stupid. Saying that the fans matter more than the story only shows your incompetence (which it is clearly shown in him believing that "let the past die" was Rian Johnson's position).

[u/cgbrn]

“It’s dead! Except for Mando and Rouge One! And the new Clone Wars! And the upcoming Kenobi show!”

[u/PastaDelFuego]

It's not just Star Wars. There's a common attitude among certain types of people that when a thing changes in ways that they don't like, that thing is now "dead." The good news is that it's only "dead" to them, but that has never stopped them from trying to declare that it's "dead" for everyone.

[u/NextDoorNeighbrrs]

An hour and 45 minutes lmfao these people are wild

[u/grimoireofstrangers]

That video is completely false. Literally everyone I know in real life who’s a Star Wars fan, and I really mean everyone, is still excited for what’s next. In fact, most of them adored the sequels. This guy needs to talk to less people on the internet and actually look around, because I think that most people are still excited for Star Wars.

[u/joethahobo]

I am a Stargate fan. When people say Star Wars is dead it gets on my nerves, cause I know what a dead franchise looks like. Star Wars is in a golden age compared to others

[u/SirCleanPants]

Mob mentality at its finest. Everyone keeps saying the same shit. Star Wars is more alive now than ever before

[u/lingdingwhoopy]

Let these people continue their descent into madness. They love their misery. Who are we to spoil it?