Agreed, The original Trilogy characters should've never been added to these new Star Wars movies if the producers didn't have much to serve those characters. Return of the Jedi was nice closing chapter to those characters; they deserved that ending of hope... but JJ Abrams had other plans. He made those characters punching bags so the new characters can look better. Yeah, JJ loves Star Wars until it has to service his own characters. I'm praying Lando's wild laugh is not a precursor of him hyperdriving into a star destroyer or the Millennium Falcon blowing up in a senseless death to serve Rey, Finn, or Poe or getting stabbed in the back by Ren or crashing on a world where he would stranded for rest of his life or... blasted out into space where he could use the force... LOL!!! Awesome!!! That's the character of the "Mary Sue" Rey to a T. I would look forward to that scene.
I know this is from ten pages ago, but I'm really struggling to understand what some fans didn't like about it. I can't think of any criticisms that wouldn't equally apply to The Empire Strikes Back.
Nice long thread all about it. Go nuts. https://www.trekbbs.com/threads/star-wars-the-last-jedi-grading-discussion.291710/
Yeah, the last EU book I read Old Man Han was being horrifically tortured for reasons I don't even remember, just that it wasn't a very good or memorable book. And if you want to get into the 'Legacy' comic books (which I never got around to reading) I gather pretty much everything turned to crap a generation later anyway.
If I remember correctly from Legacy, Luke's son continues the Jedi line of Skywalkers, Han's daughter marries into the remains of the Empire and becomes essentially Empress and has a line of Force Using "benevolent" Emperors and Imperial Knights. Han's granddaughter from the dark side turned son goes off to have family the is more or less normal (no or little Force potential) and kind of follow Han's scoundrel life style eventually. Luke having eventually faded into the Force. Han and Leia eventually died at some point. The droids continue on for some more generations. But the Legacy galaxy is still pretty hopeless with Sith pulling strings to try to end Luke's Jedi Order, the Galactic Alliance, and take over the Fel Empire all within the same series of plots (using each against the others).
Sigh... I really don’t even know why I’m bothering to go down this road. I know it’s easier to complain and buy into groupthink particularly the negative side but if one did a little research maybe one would see that the story that they keep telling themselves isn’t true. Medium: George Lucas’ Episode VII From a 2017 GQ profile of Harrison Ford: And obviously Carrie Fisher’s untimely death did in whatever plans were there for Episode IX. But if you actually choose to blame that on TPTB, then you have no sense of reality and I have no time for you. So even George Lucas, the man behind the saga, had he continued to Episode IX probably wouldn’t have let the OT crew have a happily ever after. The saga is called Star Wars after all. Not Star Happily Ever After. I know we love this saga and it can be a lot of fun but war itself rarely is. When they announced this trilogy, I never once expected all of the main three to make it through alive. I figured probably just one might and even that might be too much. I don’t know why but I’m continuously shocked by the belief of fans who would think that any further installments would have been sunshine and lollipops for the OT three.
^ People will find any excuse that they possibly can to complain, even if the reasons they're complaining are completely divorced from reality.
Really, it's fine to not like something. You don't need to invent a narrative to justify the way you feel about a film or a TV series.
There was a time when I thought there would be a kind of end to this argument. If Episode 9 did well, people liked the Last Jedi. If it did not do well, then they did not. However I now see the new line will be if Rise of Skywalker does well, "People just wanted to see Lando again. They don't care about the new characters."
It does feel like no matter what this narrative must be pushed. And it is super frustrating because there is so much more out there to the SW franchise. Even I struggled after ROTS but found more in spending time with other SW fans and focusing on the things we actually liked, rather than accusing Lucas of constantly causing damage. I feel like once Disney purchased them they became the easy scapegoat for everything wrong. Not that they have handled it perfectly but certainly not to the level of hostility presented.
Not to be nitpicky (there's all ready way too much of that in SF&F fandom), but I'm a little skeptical that the destruction of the Death Star could have left such a huge piece still stuck together like that. Back when the EU was a thing, that happened with Dark Empire, which I found to be totally awesome at the time. In hindsight, I think it was rather wacky, though I still enjoy that story. In any case, I am looking forward to seeing Episode IX! Kor
I think the prequels set an unfortunate precedent, in that now everything has to have a detailed backstory. In the OT, we didn't need to know much about the Emperor, only the role he played in Luke's journey. We didn't even know his name until the prequels, unless you obsessively read all the supplemental material. We got very little of Vader's backstory, and only when the big reveal at the end of ESB gave Obi-Wan's line about Vader's betrayal additional context. We didn't know anything about Han's history with Lando except that they had a rocky relationship at best, and that the Millennium Falcon was a point of contention between them. Boba Fett was just a mercenary in a badass costume. The Star Wars galaxy is a big place, not everything needs detailed backstories or elaborate connections to past characters or events.
TLJ made over a billion dollars and was the best selling DVD upon release, but it’s still somehow a failure because some guys on YouTube don’t like it because “reasons”. Facts don’t matter.