Ways to Waste $30 and 6 Hours of Your Life (or a Review of How Directors Ruined Star Wars)

By Isaac Sutor

Note: This post contains major spoilers for Star Wars: The Force Awakens and Star Wars: The Last Jedi

Step right up! I have a very special offer for you! How would you like to watch a movie? Only this movie comes with a twist! Halfway through, this movie will play in reverse, leaving you with no conclusions, characters who become who revert back to who they were in the beginning, and a plot that has hardly started. All this for a low price of $15-20 and 6 hours of your life. Sound good? Not convinced? If you already went to see Star Wars: The Last Jedi, you have already experienced this. The Last Jedi served to reverse everything from The Force Awakens, leaving the story-arc looking steeper than the Yongpyong Alpine center where Ester Ledecka won gold in this morning’s Olympic event. The steep reversal which occurred without a climax or resolution was due to one main reason: the directors argued like my brother and me over the last slice of birthday cake when we were 7.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens was produced by J.J Abrams, producer of such hits as Lost, Star Trek, and Cloverfield. The next installment of the new trilogy, The Last Jedi, was taken over by Rian Johnson, a less renounced director who’s only claim to fame was some involvement in Breaking Bad, and directing the 2012 movie Looper. While both men are acclaimed to some degree, they entered the new Star Wars trilogy with very different visions. These visions came to light in The Last Jedi quicker than Han Solo can make the Kessel Run in the Millennium Falcon.

There were two main story arcs Abrams set up in the first installment of the new Disney-run Star Wars trilogy. These are the question of who Rey’s parents are and the exploration of the turmoil within Kylo Ren/Ben Solo and Snoke as a villain.

The question of who Rey’s parents were, began within 20 minutes of Abram’s The Force Awakens when she wanders around the desert with the droid BB-8 remarking that the question is a “big mystery”. Abram’s set up a big question which plagued message boards, discussion forums, and plagued my brain as I went to sleep on more than one occasion. Johnson answered this question with an anticlimactic attempt to shock the audience by revealing that Rey’s parents were nobodies. In a universe where relatives have more connections than the rulers of the five houses from HBO’s Game of Thrones, this would have been a nice change of pace. Unfortunately, a general lack of character development in other areas left watchers unsatisfied and disappointed at their wasted time.

Villains were up next in Johnson’s attempt to undo Abram’s setup. Johnson argued in an interview that Snoke was practically worthless as a villain, having no purpose but to distract from the parts of the story that are actually interesting. This stands as a blatant attack on Abram’s ability to create meaningful characters. Snoke’s story arc began as a floating head yelling at Kylo Ren and ended as a pitiful leader killed in a way that spited the powerful Sith Lord set up in The Force Awakens.

Kylo Ren’s story arc reminds me of the Cherokee proverb about two wolves fighting within every man. One is good and one is evil. The one that wins is the one that we feed the most. For the child of Han Solo, these wolves are named Ben Solo and Kylo Ren. Abram’s sets up the fight between these two wolves in The Force Awakens taking Ren from a sniveling over-dramatic hormonal teenager to a character with real thoughts about good vs evil and right vs wrong. Johnson played with this question a little, before resolving the issue sending Ren down the path of evil. That in and of itself is not a problem. In fact, it seemed as if this story would finally get a confident villain, sure of himself, resolved in his conviction, and worthy of the legacy of the powerful Darth Vader that George Lucas provides in the opening scenes of Star Wars: A New Hope. Johnson’s addition to the trilogy left watchers with the same number of super bad villains as the opening scene of The Force Awakens: one angry disturbed child in a somewhat grownup body playing with a broken lightsaber.

With no tangible direction, almost no character development, and an utter lack of questions that need answering, how will J.J. Abrams be able to wrap an entire franchise worth of story and development to keep watchers happy and the Star Wars universe alive?