In any case, Johnson’s fondness for punking the audience with their own genre expectations creates room for a sort of meta-level analysis that pokes fun at the genre itself. “Yes, you expected A to happen because A is what these stories always do, but really B makes more sense, except it feels like it doesn’t because we’re used to A, but doesn’t B sort of render the whole thing nonsensical? But does that mean the genre itself is nonsensical?<\/i>” It’s a style of movie that draws attention to its own genre and deliberately breaks your immersion to think about the fact that you’re watching a movie. See also: Spec Ops: The Line<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n Q: Why do I have to stupidly drop white phosphorus on these people?\u00a0<\/p>\n A: Because you always do this kind of thing in these sorts of games, except here you’re getting a “more realistic” outcome.<\/p>\n I love this sort of thing. I think it’s fun to examine a genre through trope perversion \/ subversion. Heck, half the jokes in DM of the Rings<\/a> were pitting the tropes of High Fantasy against the completely incompatible tropes of tabletop gaming.<\/p>\n Having said all of that…<\/p>\n Genre demolition is not the sort of thing you do in the context of the second act of an ultra-traditionalist story, you absolute LUNATICS!<\/b><\/p>\n Disney’s handling of the sequel trilogy is incomprehensible to me. They began with handing the series to J. J. Abrams. Abrams directed, and the script was written by Lawrence Kasdan<\/a>. Kasdan was a writer on both Empire Strikes Back<\/i> and Return of the Jedi<\/i>. Disney began this series by very deliberately embracing a sort of ultra-traditionalism that bordered on orthodoxy.<\/p>\n I’m not the biggest fan of Abrams, even though he’s an amazing imitative and technical filmmakerInsert worn-out lens flare joke here.<\/span>. In Super 8<\/a> he did an incredible<\/b> job of capturing the look and feel of early-period Speilberg. That’s not easy! Countless starry-eyed hopefuls have tried to imitate<\/a> the Spielberg style<\/a>The first Transformers movie has a lot of quasi-Spielberg moments that don’t work at all because Michael Bay is far too crass and cynical to sell it.<\/span> and wound up creating cringy schlock<\/a>. In fact, I think Abrams is the only filmmaker besides Robert Zemeckis<\/a> to successfully capture Spielberg’s particular gift for manipulating the mood and attention of the audience.\u00a0<\/p>\n Abrams gets the surface-level stylistic details right, but Super 8 <\/i>lacks the heartfelt sentimentality that powers so many of Spielberg’s whimsical creations.\u00a0<\/p>\n The Force Awakens<\/i> is a similar kind of deal. On the surface level it looks and sounds like an amped-up version of the original movie, down to the relentlessly methodical recycling of plot points. But beneath the surface it’s lacking in conviction. It doesn’t have anything to say about the world or its characters. It’s the cinematic equivalent of someone posting “Yeah! I agree!” It was technically spectacularMan, those X-wings flying in over the water still gets me as something that never happened in the original trilogy, and yet somehow looks SO RIGHT.<\/span> and emotionally shallow. It’s not a terrible movie, but also not something I’d watch more than onceFor contrast, I’ve watched the originals dozens of times.<\/span>.\u00a0<\/p>\n So the fans complained, and Disney immediately over-corrected in the most extreme way possible. They went from slavish imitation to merciless deconstruction. Those two ideas are completely at odds, and you can’t construct a story when different parts of it disagree on such a fundamental level.\u00a0<\/p>\n Then when some fans didn’t like the deconstruction, they tried to jump back to ultra-traditionalism. But you simply can’t make a traditionalist story using the deconstructionist foundation that Johnson left behind. It’s like trying to make Shazam<\/a> a sequel to Watchmen<\/a>. I love both of those movies, but they’re ice cream and chili. They aren’t designed to go together.<\/p>\n Worse, they didn’t even bring Kasdan back to write it. Disney left (or allowed) Abrams to write the thing. I can imagine very few pairings that are more incompatible than Demolition Man Rian Johnson and the mechanical style-over-substance traditionalism of JJ Abrams. <\/p>\n Fans complain that The Last Jedi didn’t leave any plot hooks for the third movie. Other people counter that no, you could totally do a third movie where Kylo is the main bad guy and both the Resistance and the First Order are in tatters. I think both sides are right. Someone could indeed make a good story out of what The Last Jedi left behind, but J.J. Abrams is not that someone. TLJ takes the universe in a new direction, and thus J.J. couldn’t continue the story by copying scenes and plot points from earlier films.\u00a0<\/p>\n For Johnson, tropes are constructs to be questioned, subverted, or obliterated. For Abrams, tropes are a crutch that he uses to fill in the bits where emotions and logic would go. This pairing is like having a Frank Zappa<\/a> \/ Rebecca Black<\/a> double act. One flouts formulaic constructs and the other is constructed entirely of formula. It’s not just dissonant, it forms a feedback loop of ever-amplifying dissonance that tears everything else apart.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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\nSo on one hand we have traditionalists that find these genre-twisting tricks to be frustrating and off-putting because they just want their heartwarming adventure with the characters they love doing all the archetypical things we love them for. On the other side are people that have been waiting for a breath of fresh air like this and who found the slavish mechanical imitation of The Force Awakens<\/i> to be obnoxious, distracting, and boring. These are both perfectly valid reactions to these moviesAnd I feel a little of both!<\/span>, and the only reason we’re at odds is because Disney pulled this change mid-story.<\/p>\nWhat Was Disney Thinking?<\/h3>\n
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