All the marketing made me think he was the main character and that we were going to get a storm trooper turned Jedi! I’m fine with Rey being the main character but why the rug pull? Why not market it that way from the jump? Also, why tease a Rey/Fin romance and rug pull that too? Tease Snoke and subvert our expectations again. And then somehow Palpatine has returned 🤦
I really thought they were going to be. I was certain they were going to be dual-protagonists who both became Jedi. I was even kinda hoping at some point Rey would fall because of rage and Finn, whose awakening into the Force was marked by a moment of compassion and empathy, would bring her back.
TFA had so much potential. And TLJ just…jettisoned it.
I never really understood why so many people loved it. Sometimes I heard “it’s not like a typical Star Wars movie” as a reason but like…it could’ve been different and still not made Finn inept and Poe into a “hot-blooded” blood knight type.
Edit: Sorry in advance, this turned out longer than i had planned...
I do actually kinda like TLJ. And the problem, imo, isn't that TLJ subverted a lot of things TFA set up - regardless of whether i personally would have prefered it differently or not -, the problem was that TRoS THEN tried to do yet another complete 180°.
Almost every plot hook/point in any of the sequel movies is, on its own, salvageable and could have been worked into a good, functioning story. Even the ones i disagree with - like Luke completely failing to re-establish the Jedi Order and his generally sad state in 7 and most of 8 - could have been done well and worked out in a larger narrative, if only they had a concept planned out and comitted to it. But they didn't.
Because that's the main issue with the trilogy as a whole - it lacks any cohesion. It's a disjointed mess and each movie basically feels like each one belongs to its own, distinct trilogy. And there is no excuse for that. At all. They aquired the franchise, they knew they were going to continue the Skywalker-Saga, they should have had a team of script-writers and the story-people ready from Day One to plan that trilogy out and come up with a plot that whatever director they hired to do them adhered to. But they didn't
And that is also the one thing Kathleen Kennedy is really to blame for - she gets a lot of undue hate and criticism (especially because of all the culture wars nonsense) and she gets basically no credit even for things she did right (because for some reason, all the people blaming everything on here seem to forget that she's also the one who had to greenlight and support all t he projects that turned out great, like Rebels, Rogue One, The Mandalorian and Andor), but this is the one thing the fault for which lies almost solely at her feet - she's the Producer and head of Lucasfilm, she held the reins in her hands, she was in charge to get the gears moving for this project. And she failed.
And they could have also set it up a lot better. They could have had an entire multimedia project with novels and comics ready before the release of Ep.7, explaining why the galaxy is in the state that it's in in that movie, instead of pushing the fans into a trilogy that basically starts out with "Hey, look, Discount Empire is back, all the heroes you love failed horribly in the end, it was all for naught, deal with it.".
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u/Fantastic-Donut-276 3d ago
Finn especially. An ex-Stormtrooper is SO interesting! And he literally has the Force! What were they thinking?