The Star Wars sequel trilogy has come and gone, and its lasting mark seems to be The Last Jedi. J.J. Abrams kicked off the trilogy with The Force Awakens. Viewers enjoyed the film, but criticized it for being largely a rehash of plot beats from A New Hope. Disney brought Rian Johnson on to write and direct the second film, giving him plenty of creative leeway in the hopes that he could take the sequel trilogy in new directions. He tried.
Outrage over The Last Jedi was immediate, intense, and sustained. A small but significant portion of the Star Wars fan base raged over the film. They thought The Last Jedi disrespected the legacy of their favorite franchise, and they wouldn't let it go. Three and a half years after the film’s release, newly uploaded multi-hour YouTube videos dissect its many failures.
At first, Disney tried their best to defend Johnson and everyone involved with the production. Some fans placed the blame with the studio for not creating a plot outline for the trilogy. Trying to calm the minority of seething fans, Abrams stepped back in to close out the trilogy. He un-wrote as many of Johnson’s changes as possible and ignored the rest, creating The Rise of Skywalker, a finale that is almost universally disappointing.
Johnson injected a much-needed sense of humanity and possibility into Star Wars. He tried to make new a galaxy that's been visited constantly for over forty years. Disney missed out on the chance to make Star Wars as fresh and exciting as it was in 1977. The studio caved to its angriest fans and abandoned the best Star Wars film since The Empire Strikes Back.
The Problem With The Sequels
Rian Johnson diagnosed a problem at the heart of the sequel trilogy, and he tried to fix it. Neither he nor Disney, where the final say on The Last Jedi really stopped, expected to meet so much resistance. They tried to create for audiences the same experience as the original trilogy when what many fans wanted was the same story altogether.
The Force Awakens mostly got a pass for recreating A New Hope. The setup for each film is largely the same. A galaxy is under the control of an evil empire whose figurehead (at least for the audience) is the masked apprentice of the empire’s ruler. A small group of Rebels fights against that empire. Roped into it all is a young kid from a desert planet who doesn’t yet know that she’s Force-sensitive and destined to save the galaxy. It’s a good story, which is why audiences have been showing up to watch it over and over again. What The Force Awakens didn’t address, and The Last Jedi did, was that it’s all happened before.
Rebels, many of them the same characters the sequel trilogy follows, have fought against an evil galactic Empire before. They won and saved the galaxy from totalitarian control. Until the First Order rose in the space of a few decades. The sequel’s premise undercuts Return of the Jedi's victory. The Force Awakens skirts around the impact of the First Order's rise on people like Luke and Leia, preferring instead to take the audience on the adventure thrill ride they were expecting.
Addressing The Past
The Last Jedi needed to address the loss the First Order represents. The film’s detractors loathe its presentation of Luke Skywalker. Sure, he starts as a disillusioned old hermit, but what other characterization would be possible for him? Luke saved the galaxy by believing there’s good even in a man as evil as Darth Vader. The universe turned around and proved him wrong as a reward. He drove his own nephew to the Dark Side. Luke's ability to bounce back and still be a hero by the end of The Last Jedi is astounding.
Luke’s journey in The Last Jedi is heartbreaking and sincere. By the end of the film, he’s rediscovered hope, not that evil can be truly defeated, but that good can go on fighting as long as it needs to. By refusing to let Luke be just another action hero, Johnson manages to ground the sequel trilogy in a way that lets the Star Wars adventure continue without devaluing the events of the original trilogy.
The light side characters aren't the only ones struggling with the past. Kylo Ren is introduced as a Darth Vader surrogate who is himself obsessed with Vader’s legacy. In The Last Jedi, Ren continues to follow Vader’s path by killing Emperor Snoke. Unlike Vader, Kylo doesn’t redeem himself with the murder, instead choosing to take his place as the head of the First Order.
In the same scene Kylo becomes a response to The Last Jedi’s other biggest controversy: Rey’s heritage. He tells Rey that her parents were nobodies in the galaxy, with no connection to the powerful bloodlines who’ve been at war for decades. He insists that Rey should "kill the past" even as he's continuing to perpetuate it, albeit with a modern twist. Again the film forces the confrontation between legend and reality, giving Star Wars its most interesting conflict in decades.
Refusing To Let Go
Humanity is what The Last Jedi brings to Star Wars, and the galaxy far, far away hasn’t been this compelling in a long, long time. Rian Johnson insisted on telling an honest Star Wars story. The Last Jedi makes its characters and its galaxy tangible and relatable, something Star Wars hasn’t been since the original trilogy transformed Luke Skywalker into a legend.
The film isn’t without flaws. Leia’s space resurrection is admittedly cringe-worthy, but other problems aren’t as serious as detractors claim. Finn’s sidequest develops his character and the larger galaxy in new and interesting ways. Poe Dameron’s behavior wouldn’t get him answers in any kind of military organization. The Holdo maneuver doesn’t "break" hyperspace travel because the films haven’t really established rules to break, so a throwaway line elsewhere can fix any sci-fi physics concerns. Force projection is as much an out-of-the-blue power in The Last Jedi as Force lightning was in Return of the Jedi.
Everywhere Johnson tries to innovate, complaints about staying true to the past crop up. Every time the story starts to move in a new direction, some try to pull it back, to re-form it into the shape of the original trilogy. The Rise of Skywalker explicitly resurrects the past to recreate a battle already seen.
With The Last Jedi, Rian Johnson tried to free Star Wars from itself. He attempted to make the galaxy a place where new and exciting things can happen once again, and where the things that do happen have real consequences. Vocal fans resisted, and with The Rise of Skywalker, almost everything he accomplished was undone. It remains to be seen what will happen to Star Wars, and whether or not Johnson will return to it. The Last Jedi gave an opportunity that Star Wars squandered. The best fans can hope for now is that the next trilogy starts with a plot outline.