Almost every Star Wars fan on the planet celebrated The Force Awakens as the series’ return to greatness, but have not received The Last Jedi with the same level of enthusiasm. In fact, The Last Jedi has been the most divisive Star Wars movie Disney has put out so far.
As the internet continues to argue about The Last Jedi, there are some fans who don’t think either movie is very good. In fact, compared to George Lucas’s prequel films, there are some of us who think that both of Disney’s Star Wars sequels thus far have been pretty abysmal.
Disney’s films lack cohesion, direction, and vision in the story they’re trying to tell. Many of their new characters aren’t that interesting. The small number who are end up dying in The Last Jedi. The story arc from The Force Awakens to The Last Jedi has the feel of too many cooks in the kitchen. Plot points in The Force Awakens that are made out to be important and mysterious fall flat in The Last Jedi. They can’t seem to figure out who’s story they’re trying to tell or why any of it is important.
For example, much like Palpatine in the prequels, The Force Awakens presents Snoke as the puppetmaster pulling the strings – a mysterious figure behind the scenes – but then ends up being nothing of the sort in The Last Jedi. For being someone as powerful as he’s portrayed as being in The Force Awakens, Snoke dies in a pretty hackneyed way. If you went into The Last Jedi without having seen The Force Awakens, you would likely be puzzled as to who Snoke is or why he’s important.
Also, Rey’s parentage is made out to be a huge question and plot point in The Force Awakens. Who are Rey’s parents? Is she related to Luke Skywalker or Han Solo somehow? This led to endless speculation and debate among fans for two years. And then in The Last Jedi, we find out her parents were nameless junk traders who sold her for drinking money.
Another example is Kylo Ren, who is desperately trying to be Darth Vader in The Force Awakens, complete with his own black mask and computerized voice. Fans loved it. Meanwhile, in The Last Jedi, Snoke ridicules Ren for his mask and mocks him for his incompetence with a lightsaber.
Why does no one seem to really fear Kylo Ren, given how filled with the dark side of the Force Luke tells us he is? It’s safe to say at this point that Kylo Ren is Disney’s Anakin Skywalker. In fact, Kylo Ren himself states in The Force Awakens that he wants to continue what Anakin Skywalker was not able to finish as Darth Vader.
We’re told by Luke and others about the great darkness that lurks inside of Kylo Ren, and how evil he is – but outside of his prolific use of his Force telekinesis power, he’s never that threatening. He’s good at throwing temper tantrums and screaming orders when he’s angry, but not much else.
Whether he’s “officially” a Sith or not, Kylo Ren is the most uninteresting Force user in a Star Wars movie we’ve seen so far. Even Leia rescuing herself Mary Poppins-style with the Force after she is sucked into outer space in The Last Jedi is more impressive than anything Kylo Ren does with the Force in two movies. Yes, Anakin Skywalker is annoying at times in the prequels, but he is never pathetic, because you know what he’s capable of and what he will become. Meanwhile, not even Snoke takes Kylo Ren seriously from the way he talks to him in The Last Jedi. It’s a stark contrast from how Palpatine regards Anakin and his power, and his machinations to bring him to the dark side in the prequel films.
And for someone as evil and filled with the dark side of the Force as Kylo Ren supposedly is, his skill with a lightsaber is embarrassing. The most impressive lightsaber feat we’ve seen from him is killing a defenseless Han Solo. His incompetence with the lightsaber as a weapon, and getting bested by a young girl who had never used the weapon before, is one of the biggest storytelling failures of The Force Awakens – a true low point for Star Wars. The Last Jedi somewhat remedies this, but it seems Disney overall isn’t interested in the spectacle of high-skill lightsaber battles that fans were treated to in all three Star Wars prequels. Some competence and flair with a lightsaber could go a long way in making Kylo Ren more interesting and threatening as a villain.
With Rey, it’s excusable since she’s discovering the Force for the first time, and is looking for guidance and training. In The Force Awakens, it’s the first time she handles the weapon. It would be great to see a fully capable female Jedi or Sith who really knows how to handle a lightsaber in a Star Wars film. It would be great if Rey could be that Jedi or Sith – but so far, Disney has come nowhere close to that. Although maybe she doesn’t need to since the great Sith lord of the galaxy barely knows how to use the weapon himself.
It’s hard to tell whether Disney is intentionally making Kylo Ren pathetic and foolish for story purposes, or doing it thinking they’re actually making a sinister villain. If it’s the latter, they really need to go back and watch Episodes I-III again. Darth Sidious, Darth Maul, and Count Dooku all make Kylo Ren look silly as a villain by comparison, especially in the lightsaber category.
Also, where did the First Order come from? How did the remnants of the Empire turn into the First Order? Who leads the First Order? Snoke? How did Snoke come to power? How does Kylo Ren come to power? What is the chain of command in the First Order? What happened in the 30-40 year gap between Return of the Jedi and The Force Awakens? What exactly is the Resistance resisting?
Why has Disney made no attempt in their films to fill in the 30-40 year gap between Return of the Jedi and The Force Awakens to answer any of these questions? Why did Disney reject so much of the Expanded Universe Star Wars lore that fans embraced for so long?
The primary element Disney seems interested in is the spectacle of Star Wars, most likely for the purpose of putting people in the seats. Good storytelling doesn’t seem to be the priority, and they seem to have no regard for the established lore that has built up over the last several decades, or any regard for the importance of establishing their own.
Disney de-canonizing all of the Expanded Universe novels was the first warning sign that their sequels were not going measure up. Star Wars lore is important to the series. To disregard and de-canonize all of it the way they did was presumptuous and somewhat arrogant. It showed a disregard for the fervent following the Expanded Universe has built up over the decades.
When Disney bought LucasFilm from George Lucas, many fans were expecting it to be a return to form for Star Wars. Fans were expectant that Disney was going to return the series to its former glory – before Lucas supposedly ruined everything with his prequel films. Disney was going to finally give fans the Star Wars movies they’ve been asking for since Return of the Jedi. De-canonizing the beloved Expanded Universe is not consistent with that.
Meanwhile, Disney’s approach thus far to the sequel films has been a patchwork approach of taking elements of the original trilogy, throwing them together, and then seemingly being content with letting the spectacle of Star Wars, and the Star Wars name, compensate for their lack of original ideas, massive plot holes, bad writing, and flimsy character arcs. It gives their films the feel of high-budget, highly-produced fan-fiction. Fans overlooked almost all of that in The Force Awakens. However, that doesn’t seem to be the case with The Last Jedi. A significant portion of the fan base is rejecting the film.
Maybe the legacy movies will be better. Rogue One was excellent and complimented A New Hope quite well. Maybe this new Han Solo movie will be great too (although the rumors and buzz are saying otherwise). But Disney’s sequels have given no indication that any new Star Wars trilogy they attempt will be anything to celebrate. Not as long as they continue to disregard George Lucas’s legacy instead of embracing it.
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