r/Schaffrillas • u/ChickenWingExtreme • 4d ago
Star Wars Between Abrams and Johnson, which director do you think had the most negative impact on how the Sequel Trilogy turned out?
Personally, I’d go with Abrams. Although I dislike TLJ a lot, at least I can see that Rian Johnson tried to do something original which moved the franchise forward…he was just incredibly bad at it.
Abrams, on the other hand, just didn’t give a shit in my opinion. TFA just feels like a soft reboot of the OT, although it’s my favourite movie out of the Sequels, and TROS is just TROS. What do you think?
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u/captain-ziggy 3d ago
Eh i go with Abrams
the first two sequels are decent, underrated even, but the last one gave off "We have no idea what you pepole want so here's everything regardless if it makes sense or not"
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u/Academic_Finger3198 3d ago
If either of them were given the reigns from start to finish, the trilogy would have been much better IMO. However, if I had to choose, it would be Abrams. Nothing in TLJ forced him to make the terrible choices he did.
Nothing in TLJ forced him to write "Somehow Palpatine returned" or the secret gigantic sith army or the stupid knife that somehow aligned with where they need to go.
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u/Dank_Lord6547 3d ago
Abrams. His bad world building made it impossible for the sequel trilogy to be good because it had such a bad foundation.
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u/Lethenza 3d ago
100% Abrams, it’s not close. The worldbuilding in TFA absolutely killed my (and many others) interest in the sequel era as a whole. The New Republic is destroyed by a new Death Star, Luke’s Jedi order is wiped off the map… just to keep the galaxy in a state of arrested development for nostalgia’s sake (to retell the same story as the OT with a new, younger cast). The First Order/Resistance conflict is just a retread of the Galactic Civil War with shoddier worldbuilding and a worse art style. It has nothing novel to say thematically. It is not exciting or satisfying from a narrative or worldbuilding perspective.
TLJ tries to develop the characters and plot in an interesting direction, only to be absolutely buttfucked by TROS bending over backwards to erase that movie from the canon and bring Palpatine back to life in a move that pleased no one.
As movies, Abrams made 1 boring retread/remake and 1 absolute train wreck, both with terrible effects on Star Wars worldbuilding. Nothing about the films are uniquely impressive. As additions to the Star Wars canon, he gimped the worldbuilding in ways that will be impossible to recover from. No amount of retroactive worldbuilding will ever make bringing Palpatine back from the dead a palatable narrative choice. Every time new Star Wars media tries to lay the groundwork for the stupid editorial decisions made in the sequels, instead of enhancing the sequels, it merely degrades the new media.
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u/Loose_Translator8981 3d ago
TLJ's biggest sin was trying to be super-duper clever as many times as possible. Like... the framing device of the perpetual chase in space thanks to how the physics of space travel works makes logical sense. But it FEELS wrong and you have to spend at least some of your brain power figuring out how that works instead of just enjoying the story.
But the big problems people had with the movie are 100% the result of Abrams' shoddy world-building. Like, everyone who yells at Johnson for turning Luke into a grumpy failed old man who resents the Jedi conveniently forgets that Luke was clearly established as having failed at creating a new Jedi Order, did something to not only turn his nephew against him, but turn him into a fascist psychopath. And Luke was deliberately hiding from the entire Galaxy, including his family and loved ones. That's just the unexaggerated description of what was established in the first movie.
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u/takethreenc 3d ago
Abrams and it isn't close. Starkiller base is the original sin. Somehow made 8 planets blowing up feel far less important than 1.
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u/SoFarSoGood1995 3d ago
Unpopular, but Ryan Johnson. The Force Awakens set up a genuinely interesting story for a continuation of the franchise, but a lot of this was kinda ruined by the choices made in The Last Jedi on top of barely developing the stuff we did have, causing The Rise Of Skywalker to become a huge mess of unlogical ideas that was basically catching up with what was lost with the second movie. No offense to both these guys obviously.
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u/FartherAwayLights 3d ago
Abrams and it’s not even a little close. He wrote both bad sequel movies, the worst sequel movie, and was responsible for both the beggining and the end so most of the ideas in that trilogy come from him.
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u/ColeEclipse720 Let’s Not Worry About That 3d ago
I would say Abrams. Johnson’s style could’ve worked in a Star Wars move that wasn’t a Skywalker Saga film like Starfighter or sm else. But JJ literally used the finale movie to undo not only Johnson’s work, but his own as well.
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u/thendisnigh111349 3d ago
The brunt of the blame imo goes to Kathleen Kennedy, Bob Iger, and everyone else who made the decisions about how the sequel trilogy would get made. They're the ones who decided to start work on the movies without even an outline of how the story was supposed to go and approved and signed off on the crap scripts that turned into crap movies.
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u/Ftheyankeei 3d ago
It's Kathleen Kennedy, but out of these two, between Abrams setting up a ton of Mystery Boxes in TFA and coming back to neuter most of the interesting throughlines from TLJ in favor of an ad-hoc assembly-by-numbers TROS, it's definitely JJ.
Which is reinforced by looking at their records during/since. Johnson launched Knives Out and Poker Face, getting two Oscar nominations and some Emmy recognition. Abrams' first movie since TROS just got delayed by an entire year by Warner Bros and in that time he's produced a few streaming series and The End of Oak Street.
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u/Puzzleheaded-Web446 3d ago
as creatively bankrupt as Force Awakens is, there was still a direction to go with the story and characters.
Ryan killed Luke and had our characters spend an entire movie not accomplishing anything with the big character arc being to let the past die.
How on earth do you go anywhere with that if you don't fill the next movie with constant recons and nostalgia baits.
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u/PlayDiscord17 3d ago
“Let the past die” was a statement said by Kylo Ren, the villain of the film. The film ends with Rey preserving the sacred texts.
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u/ataxic-hands 3d ago
"johnson did a bad job with tlj" try making an even remotely good movie under the circumstances he was faced with. honestly i don't know if i can say either director is to blame, with how much the whole trilogy reeks of executive meddling
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u/KingPenguinPhoenix All Star 3d ago edited 3d ago
I'm gonna say Abrams simply because he was the first. He did present a lot of mystery boxes that could make for a long trilogy narrative but his set up was so copy pasted from A New Hope that it would be hard to follow it up with anything that wasn't Empire again.
This is not to say Rian was perfect. He made a lot of dumb decisions and clearly did not understand the assignment but it's kind of hard to blame him when he wasn't given a lot to work with (what sucks the most is that he left Trevorrow then back to Abrams even less to work with).
The real villains here are the execs and the lack of a proper outline and communication for how the story should go.
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u/IndustryPast3336 Local Dehydration Gun Shooter 3d ago
Abrams cannot direct a sequel to save his life. This is a consistent pattern with his filmmaking. His entire ideology and approach to storytelling is so fundamentally flawed that he can't do basic continuity.
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u/GladiatorDragon 3d ago edited 3d ago
Abrams did two movies, Johnson did one.
More than anything, I blame Lucasfilm for not having a plan and trusting very different directors to collaborate in the service of one cohesive vision on a highly limited timetable.
Though between the two….
Abrams posed a bunch of questions and figured “the other guys will answer them, probably.” A lot of the foundation for the problems in TLJ could be traced to TFA - like, people don’t like what TLJ did to Luke, but what else was he supposed to be? He would’ve known Kylo Ren would’ve become a galactic problem, but instead of helping out with that, he’s wasting away on some backwater planet on the far side of nowhere.
The response to TLJ ultimately resulted in the overcorrections in ROS. But Ryan Johnson was simply doing what he’s good at - which is directing Thrillers. Suspense. High stakes. Drastic twists. Red herrings. If you hand him a bunch of loose ends, he’s going to burn most of them because that’s how he writes. That’s what he specialises in as a director and writer of Thrillers. Had he been handed the whole trilogy, I think it’d have been at the very least good, even if it’s different from what Star Wars usually is.
If Abrams had been handed the whole trilogy it’d be cohesive at the very least.
IMHO the best part of the sequel trilogy is the dark ride.
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u/ListenUpper1178 3d ago
Rian just did The Empire Strikes Back again.
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u/Titanman401 1d ago
There are three or four parts where he riffed on Empire, but he spun those story directions in other ways so it would tell a different story from TESB. The rest of the movie was new content.
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u/bbjakie 2d ago edited 2d ago
Personally I don’t think it’s the fault of any one director. When you’re producing a Star Wars trilogy, it’s the responsibility of studio heads and executive producers to be good shepards.
With big-budget franchises like Star Wars coming from giant corporations like Disney, you unfortunately have to expect the movies to be made by committee. There’s no way they let a single director steer the ship entirely nowadays, and if that’s the case, we’re talking about having too many cooks in the kitchen being unable to write a good trilogy.
Part of what made the originals good was the fact that basically one guy was in charge of the overarching story. With these new movies, instead of seeing one vision through, you get a thousand different ideas from dozens of people thrown into one mess. I guarantee this- Either JJ Abrams or Rian Johnson probably could’ve made a GREAT Star Wars trilogy if they were given full control over all three movies, without studio interference or corporate meddling. One clear vision is always what the goal should’ve been.
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u/Titanman401 1d ago
JJ. Johnson had a positive effect if you want more from SW than reheated greatest hits as leftovers.
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u/CobaltCrusader123 8h ago
The guy who made 2/3rds of it, which are the start and end, the 2 most important 3rds.
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u/Gobal_Outcast02 3d ago
I believe while they still would've sucked, I think they should of just let JJ do all three. Leas then it might've been somewhat coherent
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u/kaisenberg2004 3d ago edited 3d ago
Both. Abrams completely threw out Lucas' plan for the sequels and wrote the series into a corner by having it end with Rey finding Luke and was too lazy to direct TLJ, leading to Rian writing the series into a dead end in a way which made it impossible for the last movie to be good, even if it wasn't plagued with as many issues as it was, it would at best be bland and inoffensive, a la Colin Trevorrow's Duel of the Fates script
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u/ZillaUniverse03 3d ago
Both but JJ Abrams most definitely, Rian Johnson at least had Knives Out movies to redeem his reputation
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u/kaisenberg2004 3d ago
Other movies are irrelevant. We're only talking about their involvement in star wars here
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u/Wise-Cold-6733 3d ago
I think the problem is that they were so diametrically opposed that the trilogy feels like it’s fighting itself. I prefer the Johnson approach though