by gisambards » Thu Oct 12, 2017 4:43 pm
For the main trilogy, moving away from aping the original trilogy would be a welcome start. While I would be surprised if The Last Jedi is as much like Empire as TFA was like ANH, it's looking like there will be more comparisons than there really should be.
Two options for what I would really like to see in terms of tone, both of which would be seen as risks, is either:
1. Actually making some effort to make it as clever and mature as the hype say they're supposed to be. They've said The Last Jedi will be darker than TFA. All this means is more of the poorly developed characters will die, they might blow up more planets or something, and some stuff might be slightly more violent than people are expecting. Rey might turn to the Dark Side for a bit, for reasons that will almost certainly be nonsense and were not built up to. It won't mean any more depth to the plot, setting or characters, which is what I'd rather see. Really what we're seeing at the moment is an intellectual property going through its emo phase - where by insisting on its own maturity despite being completely incomparable to actual examples of mature sci-fi, it's actually coming off as more childish than it would be if it just accepted what it is. Which leads on to my next point...
2. If they can't manage to make it deep - which I'm pretty sure they can't - just make it fun. I would argue the core of the Original Trilogy's strength is it knows exactly what it is: a series of movies that can appeal to all ages, but where the main audience is supposed to be children. As such, it knows it can't get to the point of maturity where children would start to be alienated, so - without losing the much higher writing quality it had anyway - embraces that it's ultimately quite immature at heart.
The plot has twists and turns, but is ultimately very simple, and that's actually fine. Characters like Darth Vader, Leia and Han Solo aren't deep, multi-faceted characters, but they aren't presented as such: they're perfect for what they're supposed be, and that's why they're so memorable - the whole thing is just a really well-done take on old cliches. If they can't make the new films actually as clever as they insist they are, something straight-up fun will have much longer lasting appeal than the stuff they're doing at the moment.
Last edited by
gisambards on Thu Oct 12, 2017 4:58 pm, edited 1 time in total.