Timber

So establishing a love triangle in ESB was a set up for revealing that Luke and Leia were twins?

Jay G.

You can say it's a softer BO than TFA, but in overall BO terms it can't be considered soft.

And while you can have any opinion you want, you haven't provided a clear, reasonable argument for how the BO clearly reflects an impact from a strong negative reaction to the film. It opened basically on par with predictions made before the general audience saw the film, and its performance since then has been in line with a well-received film after factoring for things like the odd placement of holidays this year.


For 3, I don't see why there has to be a "big bad" for them to team up. Maybe they can just team up to create a new Jedi order, or at least a new group of Force users, under whatever name. There's the conflict of whether Rey can "turn" Kylo, or Kylo turn Rey, or if they'll destroy each other in the process (they currently seem pretty evenly matched). It'd be interesting if Rey decides that Jedi being fully "light" isn't sustainable, and they have to embrace their dark side and manage it, instead of fully denying it. Not fully dark or fully light, but a balance inside each person, instead of externally via different people.

Noonan

What would the conflict in the film be in that scenario? They're fighting each other for 2/3 of the movie then Kylo out of nowhere decides he doesn't want to be supreme leader of the Order...just because? I feel there would need to be a larger event to get them together. But with how the movies have gone so far, I guess anything is possible.

Jay G.

Kylo finds out Rey's mother's name is Martha.

Looking at ROTJ, Vader's turn is sort of sudden as well. He's swordfighting with Luke, trying to take him out, but then when the Emperor steps in, Vader's suddenly like, "oh no, this won't do at all." We only get Luke earlier stating that he senses conflict in Vader to set that up, but we go along with it because it's what we want to see happen.

I'm not the writer, so I don't know how they will handle it. Maybe Rey finds balance within herself, and has to take out Kylo who refuses to change. But there doesn't have to be a "big bad" manipulating Kylo, like there was with Vader, to make the Rey vs Kylo dynamic interesting.

Noonan

Well that's kinda my point. It took Vader seeing the Emperor hurting/trying to kill his son to turn. What would be the equivalent for Kylo? As far as I can tell, he has no one in his life whom has that much impact on him.

Jay G.

But why did it have that effect, when Vader was trying to kill Luke himself just a few moment before? It's somewhat arbitrary.

Kylo does seem to have an attachment to Rey based on this film. It doesn't necessarily have to be a familiar connection for someone else to have an effect on you.

Brack

He couldn’t bring himself to kill his mom, so there is that.

kefrank

In the spirit of needlessly nitpicking these new movies, where the crap has Force Ghost Anakin been all these years that Kylo Ren was idolizing Vader? Seems like a simple conversation with Grandpa Force Ghost could have neutralized Snoke's manipulation of Ben and rendered this whole trilogy unnecessary. Now I hate this trilogy because it makes no sense given what we saw in ROTJ.

Rob V

You're right... but the poetic justice of Kylo "almost" pulling the trigger but doesn't and then his guards do? That was actually good stuff. I just can't believe she force flew back to a ship --- that's the dumbest thing since Obi-Wan rode the lizard beast to chase down Grievous.

Noonan

Yeah, I guess. And I just thought of another potential ending...Rey dies in some bad way. Kylo reacts/turns and take the New Order to the side of good. Skywalker blood rules the galaxy in the way of the Jedi. But that still would require some other force to kill Rey, which would cause Kylo's turn.

fumanstan

Right, that's basically what I just said. Again, I'm not mcnabb though, and still don't think read that post as an example of the revolt you spoke of.

I'm not sure how many times I can keep saying this, but I don't think there's an overall feeling that this is a poor or bad movie at all. It makes sense to me that most box office predictions would be in line with something well received, so links and articles you're posting aren't changing my mind.

I don't have stats, polls, or links to back up my gut feeling and impressions based on total box office take (so far), and i'm ok if you think that's unreasonable

Obi-Wanma

Who says she needs training? Luke Skywalker, the master Jedi that everyone loves, trained with Obi-Wan for an afternoon and Yoda for a couple of days. And she has the Jedi texts and Force ghosts to help her.

Noonan

Sure, she can use a saber but in that scenario I don't see her qualified to rule the galaxy. If the Resistance (who's numbers can almost be counted on one hand at this point) fully defeats the Order and Kylo, who's in charge?

Obi-Wanma

Someone. Does it matter? Into whose qualified hands was the galaxy placed at the end of ROTJ?

RoboDad

The screenplay is taken from the story. For ESB, Leigh Brackett and Lawrence Kasdan wrote the screenplay from Lucas's story. For ROTJ, Kasdan and Lucas wrote the screenplay, again from Lucas's story. The story for all three movies was written by Lucas. Any deviations from that story in the screenplays would have been either approved or rejected by him (and in most cases, changes were rejected).

The point people are trying to make is that, even though the story for the OT was made up as he went along, all of it came from Lucas, who had created the characters and story universe in the first place. He had (at least) an idea of who and what he wanted the characters and circumstances to be, and even when he changed those things, he had his own original ideas to compare them against.

When the story itself is written by different people for different movies, it becomes more like episodes of a TV show, where the continuity is much more tenuous. TFA was written by Kasdan, Abrams, and Michael Arndt. TLJ was written by Johnson alone, in a vacuum, without even a written summary of what Abrams had in mind for any of his mystery boxes.

kefrank

I managed to dig up JJ's summary of what he had in mind for all the mystery boxes:

mcnabb

I have to ask if you saw ROTJ in 1983, or did you see it after when it came out on VHS in the 90's? Nobody in 1983 thought Vader would save Luke, in fact, most people wanted to see Luke kill Vader and The Emperor. Everyone was shocked when Luke threw down his lightsaber in 1983, almost to the point of, "What the hell is he doing?"

Jay G.

The Leigh Brackett screenplay, and Lucas's original outline, didn't have the Vader reveal. In fact, Father Skywalker’s ghost appears to Luke. They also upped the romance between Luke & Leia, with Luke actually declaring his love for Leia in the first draft. Lando is a clone. Han escapes with everyone else. The movie was titled "Chapter II, The Empire Strikes Back."

Lucas was seriously just making it up as he went along, and wildly changing things as he progressed through drafts. The one advantage is that there really weren't any "mysteries" that he set up in the first film that had to be resolved.

Jay G.

I didn't say it's what we expected to happen, but it's an incredibly crowd-pleasing moment. It's giving the audience what it wants, good triumphing over evil, and even the redemption of a character they probably didn't even expect to be redeemed.

There were similar cheers in my theater with Kylo killed Snoke and teamed up with Rey to kill the guards. It made Kylo's turn after the fight just that much more devastating.

fujishig

If they rewrote the film so that Leia died because Fisher died in real life, you'd get endless complaining that they did her character a disservice and that it was too predictable. As it was, her real life death had you kind of expecting her on screen death and it helped the swerve (even if the execution was questionable). Heck I'm sure the trailer convinced most people that she was going to die in that scene.

I'd say Kylo is irredeemable at this point after killing his father and acting like a whiny brat, but then Vader blew up planets and killed a ton of people too. The difference is nobody at this point wants him to turn like they did Vader, so why do it? I could see some people being convinced, along with Rey, if he was redeemed in this movie, but after it no amount of manipulation will make him a likable character again, which is fine, since he's now the main villain.

They're kind of stuck at this point. There's no way they can have Kylo kill Rey, the backlash would be enormous especially with the newer fans (my little girl, for instance, would be crushed). Unless they're tying in another trilogy, it has to be a happy ending. That doesn't necessarily mean it will be bad, I think we all expect the superheroes to prevail in most of their movies as well and those still do really really well.

They could easily establish Rey at the end of this movie as wanting to go along that starmap and uncover the ways of the jedi, training a bunch of students along the way, and starting with the jedi texts she "acquired." Although the jedi were kinda terrible at their jobs (at least what we've seen), and if she was indeed abandoned by jedi for whatever reason, that kind of puts a damper on her following the jedi way.

Leia never thought it would be useful to train with Luke even a little, with the Jedi order decimated like that?

mcnabb

I'll take your word for it because every crowd is different. But I don't hear any cheers when Snoke was killed in my theater, probably because nobody really gave a shit about him since we never got to know him.

Noonan

The only claps my showing had was when Luke was still there after all the blaster fire...but then of course we found out he was never really there in the first place...

kefrank

The meaningful thing in that scene for the audience is the choice Kylo Ren makes. Snoke was developed all that he needed to be for that moment to be what it was.

mcnabb

I honestly don't know why they locked themselves into this trilogy (or Lucas locked himself into the Prequel Trilogy of 3 movies either).

The OT characters are gone (yes Luke can come back as a Force Ghost), but the Trilogy is now about Rey, Finn, Poe, BB8, Kylo Ren, why be stuck with a narrative of one movie in Episode 9?

I think it would be more interesting if they said the next story would be 2 movies, because Episode 9 is essentially a restart of the Trilogy. That way they could set some new storyline up with just Rey and Kylo Ren, and develop it over 2 movies.

That could actually be a better way to end The Skywalker Saga at 1-8, and Random Rey reboots the new Saga at Episode 9-10, and then a new generation for 11, 12, 13, etc. These Saga numbers have limited their storytelling (including Lucas) sometimes.

GuessWho

Episode IX: Part A
Episode IX: Chapter 2